Art Capital

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The Institute for Middle East Studies, in-partnership with the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, invites you to join author Beth Derderian and discussant Joshua Bell for an exploration of Art Capital: Museum Politics and the Making of the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

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. Dr. Derderian traces the emergence of a new logic, wherein the ways that artists represent the state shift, as does the notion of what constitutes 'good art.' In addition, these intersecting forces spur preemptive erasures that neutralize and depoliticize difference for museum publics.

Drawing on ethnographic research with artists, curators, museum staff, gallerists, art teachers, and other arts professionals, this Art Capital analyzes the UAE art world as a microcosm of these massive, epistemic changes.

We hope you will join the Institute for Middle East Studies and the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design to discuss Art Capital: Museum Politics and the Making of the Louvre Abu Dhabi with author Beth Derderian and discussant Joshua Bell.

Speakers:

Dr. Beth Derderian is an assistant professor on the Renée and Lester Crown Chair for Modern Middle East Studies. She was previously an assistant professor of anthropology and Museum Studies at the College of Wooster. She holds a PhD in anthropology  from Northwestern University and an MA in Near Eastern & Museum Studies from New York University. Stanford University Press published her book, Art Capital: Museum Politics and the Making of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, in January 2026. She has published articles in American Ethnologist, Museum Anthropology, and Journal of Arabian Studies as well as on Jadaliyya and MERIP. Her current projects include a graphic novel about excavations at Pella in Jordan, co-authored with artist Azim Al Ghussein, and a monograph on wartime seizures of Middle Eastern artifacts. She also co-founded the Pella at Wooster project.

Dr. Joshua Bell is a cultural anthropologist who combines ethnographic fieldwork with museum and archival research to study relationships among people, artifacts, and the environment. Since 2000, Dr. Bell has worked with communities in Papua New Guinea's Purari Delta on the effects of resource extraction. Since 2011, Dr. Bell has led a collaborative project on cell phones and the global connections they embody. At the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, Dr. Bell chairs the Department of Anthropology and stewards the Oceanic collections and the National Anthropological Archives' cultural holdings. He is a founding member of the Recovering Voices Program, co-directs the Mother Tongue Film Festival, directs the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology, and teaches at the George Washington University.