Art Capital: Museum Politics and the Making of the Louvre Abu Dhabi (Culture and Economic Life)

Museums often served nationalist and imperialist interests in the past, but the primary force in the 21st century is the market.Museum franchising-exemplified by the Louvre Abu Dhabi-is one of the most visible cases of the increasing entanglement of art and museums with capital interests.Such projects are often touted as global enterprises diversifying the art world.Frequently, critics of these controversial projects question these claims and market influence. The intersection of these two forces-increasing capitalization and moving toward inclusivity-creates a fundamental tension, and that is the subject of Beth Derderian's Art Capital.Focusing on the decade between the Louvre Abu Dhabi's announcement and its eventual opening, the book analyzes how major shifts away from the 19th- and 20th-century paradigm of culture-state representation play out in museums' and artists' everyday practices.Derderian traces the emergence of a new logic, wherein the ways that artists represent the state