![]() The government commission overseeing the area’s development has given scholarships to 500 local residents to study abroad and sent dozens of local guides and hospitality staff to train in Europe and the United States, all to prepare for the tourists. In small, dusty Al Ula, a town of 45,000 where the economy revolves around government jobs and small fruit farms, development means unexpected prosperity. “I feel privileged to visit before other people come.” “I feel like it’s a preview,” said Tomoya Tsuruta, a Japanese tourist at one of Al Ula’s ancient ruins who decided to visit Saudi Arabia after it introduced electronic tourist visas for citizens of 49 countries last year. If anything, he said, there’s a danger of overcrowding, which would threaten the area’s archaeological jewels and natural beauty.Įarly adopters are already here, ready to visit uncrowded sites nobody back home has ever Instagrammed. AlMadani believes they’ll come in droves. ![]() Though analysts have questioned whether foreign tourists will want to visit a country with an alcohol ban, customs that frown on gender mixing and a reputation for authoritarian repression, Mr. ![]() More than 50,000 tourists came in 2019, he said, including visitors to a music festival featuring Andrea Bocelli, the Italian tenor, and Lang Lang, the Chinese pianist. AlMadani said the government hopes tourism will make up three-quarters of the Al Ula-area economy by 2030. To Saudi Arabia, which covered the artists’ travel expenses, Desert X is as much a profit driver as a meeting of minds. (The rest of the nine artists in the show are Middle Eastern or based in the United States or Europe.) Still, Desert X leaders spoke proudly of the efforts they had made to include local residents, like holding art workshops for Saudi women or making entrance to the exhibition free. Though the setting is new, the five Saudi artists in the exhibition have arguably already crossed boundaries and bridges like many other Saudi artists, they have lived, studied or exhibited in Europe or the United States. The Los Angeles Times’s art critic, Christopher Knight, scathed the “morally corrupt” collaboration as “merely putting lipstick on a pig.”īut Manal AlDowayan, a Dubai artist whose installation “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t” stood not far away, brushed off the high-flown press-conference chatter. Three of Desert X’s board members, including the prominent artist Ed Ruscha, resigned in protest. These were the fruits of Desert X AlUla, a partnership between Desert X, a California-based art biennial that had staged two previous exhibitions in the Coachella Valley, and the Saudi government, which had coaxed Desert X to mount a show in its own western desert at the country’s expense.Ĭontroversy ensued, as it tends to when Saudi Arabia - whose government has hacked the iPhone of one of the world’s richest men, tortured dissidents, dismembered a critical journalist and helped ignite a humanitarian disaster in Yemen - overlaps with Western institutions. Across the gold-and-russet sandstone canyon, the brawny rock formations sprouted contemporary art: an iridescent spaceshiplike sculpture, a glinting metal tunnel, a scattering of brightly painted spheres. At a buffet ornamented with cantaloupes carved in the shape of flowers, waiters tended a fresh-squeezed juice station and rows of dainty canapés. AL ULA, Saudi Arabia - The Coachella art crowd had arrived in the Saudi desert, and chic caftans in head-turning colors outnumbered abayas on the sand.
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