As galleries and collectors gear up for Art Basel’s biggest fair of the year in two weeks, the company’s recently announced Qatar deal continues to be the center of art world gossip.Three weeks ago, Art Basel dropped a major surprise: next year, it will host the first edition of a new art fair in Qatar, the first of its kind in the region. It’s been no secret that Basel, the premier art fair purveyor, has been narrowing in on the Gulf for its next move. Last November, rumors swirled that the fair would take over Abu Dhabi Art in exchange for a major cash injection. While that deal never materialized, the new partnership with Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) and QC+—a subsidiary of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and a commercial arm of Qatar Museums, respectively—is finalized, even if both sides are tight-lipped on the details. The Qatar-Basel deal is the latest signal that the Middle East’s art scene has reached a new level of development—or, perhaps, that the powers that be are ready to push it there. The question in the interim remains: Which of the region’s capitals will become a new art world center on par with Hong Kong? And are there enough collectors to support all this new infrastructure?Pace Gallery CEO Marc Glimcher said the Gulf still appears to be in a “If you build it, they will come” phase. “There’s not only three customers there,” Glimcher told ARTnews, referring to the region’s royal families. “We believe there are many more, potentially. It’s an evolutionary process.”Basel is obviously betting that there are many more collectors waiting to be brought into the fold in Qatar and nearby. While Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz declined to discuss the specifics of the deal with QSI and QC+, he told ARTnews the “intentional” choice of partners was designed to bring an entrepreneurial energy aligned with Qatar’s growing ambitions in culture, sport, and entertainment. MCH Group, Basel’s parent company, has struggled financially in recent years. (Horowitz did not disclose how much cash, if any, Art Basel is getting to launch the fair in Doha.)While no exhibitors have been announced or finalized yet, the fair will launch with around 50 galleries—a number Horowitz called “symbolically important,” a way to signal a deliberate, restrained start. Unlike Basel’s larger fairs in Miami, Hong Kong, or Paris, the Doha edition will have a distinct character. “The look and feel will be intentionally different from the other Basel fairs,” he said. The aim, he added, is not just to stage another fair but to build a “long-term, sustainable event” that will help shape a regional market and reflect the specific cultural and institutional ecosystem of the regionBasel is far from the first to try to develop a sustainable ecosystem in the region. For years, Art Dubai, which resulted from a public-private partnership with the Dubai International Financial Centre, has stood as the region’s premier fair, evolving since 2007 from a flash-in-the-pan curiosity to a confident, mature platform. At the most recent edition, in April, the fair featured 120 exhibitors from over 60 cities, with a strong emphasis on parts of the globe not usually centered at Basel and Frieze fairs, like India, Iran, Morocco, Turkey, and, of course, the Middle East. With the benefit of hindsight, it appears as though Art Dubai made the first leap signaling a new status quo for the region earlier this year, when it poached Basel’s longtime global head of gallery relations Dunja Gottwies to be the fair’s new director and Alexie Glass-Kantor, who has curated a section at Art Basel Hong Kong for a decade, to oversee artistic strategy. “The cultural landscape in the region has never been static; it’s always been dynamic and future-facing,” Gottwies told ARTnews over email. “New initiatives like Basel’s arrival in Doha reflect the global recognition of this region’s importance. Having recently arrived in Dubai, it is clear to me that Dubai is a city of ambition and openness and the center of the region’s commercial art scene. Art Dubai reflects that, it is a platform created here, growing with the region, and extending an invitation into the future.”As Art Dubai’s longtime artistic director Pablo del Val told ARTnews in April, Art Dubai is not “a market for trophies.” Rather, it’s about building relationships in a region that looks increasingly central to the global art market’s future. While Art Basel’s Horowitz has stuck to a similar line when talking about the new Doha fair, it’s hard to imagine Basel not securing—and emphasizing—the participation of the mega-galleries and the A+ material they would bring to the fair.The hope, then, for Art Dubai and, a few hours away, Abu Dhabi Art—the rumored original suitor of Basel’s Middle East strategy—is to differentiate through deeper, more organic links to galleries in the region.At Abu Dhabi Art’s most recent edition in November, the fair grew in size and signaled its own strategic reset, launching a Modern section for the first time and offering a stronger focus on research and curatorial depth. That translated to many galleries bringing rarely seen works by Arab artists working in the 1960s to ’80s.That deepening historical engagement aligns with the larger strategy of Abu Dhabi, which has differentiated its culture strategy from the other emirates through the development of major institutions like the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, which has inched towards completion. Abu Dhabi Art, too, reflects the deeper involvement of the government there: it is managed by the emirate’s Department of Culture and Tourism, which also runs the museums.The new direction—and the region’s growth—were enough to convince Pace to participate in the Abu Dhabi fair this coming fall for the first time in almost a decade, Glimcher said. And, with the Guggenheim and Sheikh Zayed museums finally about to open, and TeamLab having just opened, the Abu Dhabi art scene is getting more robust.Fair director Dyala Nusseibeh told ARTnews that there is more interest in the upcoming 2025 edition than she can accommodate. “When I joined in 2016, we had 37 galleries. Last year, we had over 100. I actually don’t have space for the galleries that have applied. We are ever increasing in size because there is this really interesting growing market.”Nusseibeh framed the arrival of Art Basel Qatar as a development that will benefit the entire region’s art market. “I think of the region as a block, not just single countries working independently. We have our own ecosystems, but we’re also part of a much broader one,” she said.Will Lawrie, who has been active in Dubai’s art scene since 2005 and now runs Lawrie Shabibi gallery, told ARTnews that there’s more competition among the fairs than many are letting on. Lawrie compared the Art Basel–Qatar deal to ones seen in other industries, like airlines, football, and Formula One, which have been rapidly reshaped by the rivalry between different Gulf cities. The cultural sector, he suggested, is undergoing a similar process. While Saudi Arabia and the UAE have recently drawn more attention in the cultural sphere, Lawrie said not to discount Qatar. The Qatar Museums Authority has been active for 20 years, with leading institutions like Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art and the Qatar National Museum, and many more on the way. Public art by Richard Serra and Damien Hirst dots the desert. And, according to Lawrie, Qatar’s collectors were among the first in the region to buy art seriously across multiple categories. “They had a head start because they began collecting earlier,” he said.Veteran Dubai dealer Sunny Rahbar, cofounder of the Third Line gallery, agreed, saying simply that Doha is “way ahead of UAE and Saudi in terms of institutions.”Still, questions remain. In 2008, Rahbar opened a satellite branch of the Third Line in Doha with the support of a local collector. At the time, she said, the city had little in the way of a gallery ecosystem—just one other space—and while public programming attracted some visitors, the collector base was thin beyond the ruling family. “There wasn’t the kind of broader community of art buyers that we have in Dubai,” she said. After about 18 months, the gallery closed. “At the time,” she said, “it just wasn’t sustainable.” Rahbar hasn’t returned to Doha since, but noted that friends have told her the city’s art scene has evolved dramatically.Tariq Al-Jaidah, a Qatari collector and founder of Doha’s Katara Art Center, sees opportunity—and risk—in Art Basel’s move. While Qatar’s museum infrastructure is formidable, he described the commercial gallery scene as “humble” and noted that the real challenge lies in building a knowledgeable local collector base. “The money is here, but people need to be more educated,” he said.Al-Jaidah cautioned that Basel’s success will depend on reading the market carefully. Rather than showcasing only blue-chip trophy works, he advised focusing on mid-range pieces that resonate with local tastes. In a culture where collecting is still maturing, he added, patience and respect will be as crucial as prestige.“Content matters,” he said. “People want to live with the art they buy.”(It also bears mentioning that Qatar went from one of the biggest buyers of art in the Gulf in the early 2000s, when money was being funnelled into Qatar Museums, then called Qatar Museums Authority, to seeing budget cuts around 2014, the year of the opening of Doha’s Hamad International Airport, which is lined with some of the blue-chip the Authority had acquired.)Qatar’s more recent past raises thornier questions. The country’s hosting of the 2022 FIFA World Cup was celebrated for its spectacle but was overshadowed at times by controversy over human rights abuses. Despite public reforms to labor laws, reports from groups like Human Rights Watch pointed to thousands of migrant workers who died or were injured in the construction boom leading up to the tournament—a human toll whose precise scale remains contested. FIFA president Gianni Infantino, defending Qatar against Western criticism, claimed that the games had advanced worker protections, but critics have argued the changes were partial and poorly enforced.There have also been issues with freedom of expression: in November, artist Inci Eviner accused Mathaf of censoring one of her videos, and in 2020, the Lebanese band Mashrou’ Leila, whose lead singer is gay, had an event in Qatar cancelled due to local backlash.Basel, for its part, has defended its independence. When asked by Hyperallergic about the possibilities of running into freedom of expression hurdles or, worse, pushback from the Qatari government, a Basel spokesperson said, “Art Basel Qatar, like Art Basel’s other fairs, will be curatorially and operationally independent.” There are practical questions, too. Costs for galleries are already high as the art market slogs through the second year of a slowdown. It seems likely that Art Basel will subsidize some part of exhibitors’ costs for the first edition, from hotel stays to booth fees and shipping. There is a precedent for this in the recent Art Week Riyadh, where galleries were invited to participate in a hybrid fair and noncommercial event (technically, the galleries could not sell while there). The curators of Art Week picked the art and covered shipping to and from the galleries as well as accommodations and travel for one staff member.But, even with lowered costs, the scheduling is tight and the art fair calendar is past the point of saturation: Doha’s February slot puts it close to both Frieze Los Angeles and Art Basel Hong Kong, forcing galleries to make tough decisions.One thing is certain: the Middle East art fair map has been redrawn—and everyone is paying attention. Ben Rawlingson Plant, an arts consultant who has worked in the region for 20 years, cautioned against Western arts professionals and dealers seeing the Gulf as an easy gold rush. “From my experience, the leaders of this region are smart and savvy, following considered strategies for growth. They understand the benefits of such partnerships and will invariably get their money’s worth,” he said.Meanwhile, Libya-born arts patron Princess Alia Al-Senussi, who has been closely involved in the development of Art Basel Qatar and is a senior international advisor for Basel (as well as an advisor to Saudi’s Ministry of Culture), similarly told ARTnews that the new fair will “help grow collectors and grow the conversation,” not just in Qatar but across the Middle East. She suggested that there is “incredible synergy” between Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the arts. “I would hope that there’s no rivalry” between the fairs in the region, Al-Senussi said. “I am somebody who has built my career on helping everyone, and I believe very much in that saying, ‘a rising tide lifts all boats.’”