Glenn Lowry, the outgoing director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, will work as an advisor to the Islamic Arts Biennale in Saudi Arabia, he revealed in an interview this week.Lowry, who announced his decision to leave MoMA last September, will be succeeded by longtime prints and drawings curator Christophe Cherix this fall. On the podcast The Art World: What If…?!, hosted by Charlotte Burns, Lowry shared his plans to occupy his time by advising the Islamic Arts Biennale, held in the Saudi city of Jeddah, as well as the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi.“I’m very interested in the Middle East,” Lowry told Burns. “It’s a part of the world that I started my career in, and I’m fascinated by what’s happening, particularly in the Gulf area, but not just in the Gulf area.” He later added, “The population isn’t as dense, but when you think about fascinating cultural activity, there’s an enormous amount there.”A scholar of Islamic art, Lowry worked as a curator at the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC, formerly known as the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, prior to MoMA.The Islamic Arts Biennale is an initiative of the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, established in 2020 by the Saudi Ministry of Culture as part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s bid to ramp up tourism and ease its reliance on oil. Though the Biennale has been praised for its displays of rare early art historical treasures and its focus on contemporary practices from the wider Muslim world, its associations with Saudi soft power have sparked allegations that the show is “artwashing” the country’s dismal human rights record.“I spend a lot of time in the Gulf. It’s amazing what’s going on there,” Lowry said on the podcast. “Very different system, patronized in a very different way and realized in a very different way, but very ambitious in the same way that culture in this country was very ambitious 100 years ago.”But perhaps it is not so different from models of patronage in the US, or at least not for Lowry, who is accustomed to accepting money from unsavory characters. MoMA’s board, after all, has its own questionable human rights footprint. Leon Black, a former friend and client of Jeffrey Epstein whose millions in payments to the convicted sex offender are under scrutiny by a Senate committee, remains a trustee despite a years-long campaign to remove him. (Lowry, in this recent interview, was prompted to address that controversy but deflected, emphasizing that Black and the board have acted in the museum’s best interest.) Activists have also called for the removal of MoMA chair Marie-Josée Kravis, whose husband Henry Kravis runs KKR, a firm invested in arms manufacturers and Israeli defense contractors. The list goes on.In any case, Lowry had already made his views on the art world’s ethical conflicts crystal clear in 2023 — ironically, also on the Art World: What If…?! podcast, when he declared in its second-ever episode that questioning museum trustees over their political affiliations or financial entanglements amounts to “fascism.”“It doesn’t matter whether they’re of the progressive left or the reactionary right if they’re supporting the programs and artists we believe in,” Lowry said at the time.“I admire activists. I often believe in the causes that they espouse,” said Lowry, who once suggested that MoMA protesters were trying to destroy the museum, in the 2023 episode. “But in the end, I’m a pragmatist. I like to get things done. And I recognize that I don’t have all the answers, and neither do the activists. Nor do the trustees. We live in a world of compromises.” Compromises, indeed.