While touring the Vatican a few years ago, my friend Whitney and I ruminated about a scheme to quickly pay back our student loans: take a miniature Mother and Child from any one of the dark hallways within the labyrinthian complex and sell it on the black market (i.e. eBay).  And who would stop us, the clown-suited Swiss guards with their medieval halberds?  We ended up resisting, perhaps influenced by our past reading of Pascal, in fear of the slight chance of eternal damnation.

In just three months, you can learn about the psychology of actual art thieves as well as insight into the black art market, money laundering, and forgery in a new, unaccredited master’s program of Art Crime in Umbria, Italy (so you’ll eat and drink well, too!).  The New York Times reports that the inaugural class consists of private security types, art historians, various museum professionals and lawyers who come from as far as the U.S. to attend.

Pictured above is one of only two known portraits of Francis Bacon by Lucien Freud; it was stolen in 1988 in broad daylight from the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.  There remains a £100,000 award for its retrieval.

I’m going to make a very rough metaphor, bare with me.  Someone pompous once said that “you can take the boy out of the Midwest, but you can’t take the Midwest out of the boy.”  Similarly, the nouveau riche United Arab Emirates throws money at massive international projects to put themselves on the map (and perhaps compensate for being culturally irrelevant up until a half century ago), but do the ruling Sheiks really have a passion for the arts or do they just want the acclaim?  I think that attempted parallel failed.  Regardless…

Abu Dhabi, one of the seven Emirates that make up the U.A.E., has announced a $27 billion cultural development on Saadiyat Island (as an aside, Human Rights Watch has criticized the labor conditions here) that will include a Guggenheim branch designed by architect Frank Gehry, a National Museum designed by Lord Norman Foster, and a performing arts center designed by Zaha Hadid.  But getting the most press right now is the Louvre Abu Dhabi, to be designed by Jean Nouvel; the Emirate paid France around $555 million for use of the Louvre’s name, and access to art loans, special exhibition, and “management advice.”

The museum is slated to open in 2013, but the world got its first glimpse at just what a $56 million a year acquisition budget can buy at a preview exhibition attended by the likes of President Nicolas Sarkozy.  Highlights include a Bellini Madonna and Child, Jean-Francois de Troy’s Esther Fainting Before Ahaseurus, Manet’s The Bohemian and Still Life with Bag and Garlic (which were originally part of one larger canvas), and a Mondrian purchased from the Yves St. Laurent sale in February.  The curators are explicitly trying to make the Louvre Abu Dhabi the first “universal museum” in the middle east, with pieces from all periods and regions.

But, really?  How do you properly curate a world-class museum in a country where censorship is such an accepted part of life?  Social and political ideas, particularly dissenting ideas, are central to the history of art.  Everyone has heard the seriously backward stories coming out of the Emirates that show the difficulty of reconciling economic development and modernization with religious and cultural conservatism (e.g. raped men being charged with homosexuality, foreign couples jailed for allegedly having sex on the beech, etc.).  How, for example, could justice be done to, say, the Francis Bacon exhibit at the Met if it were to leave out the essential gay relationships that inspired so much of his work?  Would this museum turn down the chance to host such an exhibit, or change (and misinterpret) it substantially, and in doing either fail in its role as a public educator to expose a whole new audience to one of the most important painters of the 20th century?

And don’t get me wrong, I’ve been to Dubai and enjoyed myself– so to counter-balance my criticism, I’ll encourage you all to go visit these works (they’ll be on display until July 2nd) before they go into storage for the next four years.  Emirates- an incredible airline- is having a one-day sale on June 4th that offers $100 off any seat booked online.  Don’t even think about having sex on any beaches, though.

It’s like Francis Bacon week on The Amateur Art Collector!  A big retrospective of his opened at the Met yesterday, but to surprisingly little buzz in New York as far as I can tell.  There’s also a related lecture tomorrow at 6pm that’s free with museum admission.

Here’s the official website and blurb:

The first major exhibition in New York in twenty years devoted to one of the most compelling painters of the twentieth century, Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective features some 130 works–sixty-five paintings and as many archival items from public and private collections from around the world–that span the entirety of the artist’s full and celebrated career. Marking the centenary of the artist’s birth in Dublin in 1909, the exhibition brings together the most significant works from each period of Bacon’s career, focusing on the key subjects and themes that run through his extraordinary creative output. The presentation affords the most comprehensive examination to date of Bacon’s sources and working processes, offering a reevaluation of the artist’s work in light of a range of new interpretations and archival materials that have emerged since his death in 1992.

The trusty New York Times recaps the Hong Kong International Art Fair, which ended this past Sunday.  Check it out here.

The article specifies that two Francis Bacon portraits offered by Ben Brown Fine Arts were a big draw at the event.  I point this out because I finally saw Love is the Devil last night– the artsy 1998 Bacon biography that focuses on his troubled romantic relationship with George Dyer.  It’s a  fantastic story, but I give the movie a solid ‘ok’ to ‘ok+’.  Fun tidbit, though, the cast includes (a hardly recognizable) Tilda Swinton and (a naked) Daniel Craig before they became the huge stars they are today.