Qatar: The Shape of Tomorrow

Doha: Plastic and ready-made, it’s a city built for Jeff Koons.  When I run into him in March at the elevator bank at the
W Doha Hotel, it feels staged. House music plays at a tasteful volume for nine o’clock in the morning. Koons’s smile is cartoonish and his gray skinny tie impeccably knotted. A frequent guest of the Qatari royal family, the artist is in the desert peninsula’s capital to headline the New York Times Art for Tomorrow conference. For a cool $1,995, attendees from around the globe enjoy a three-day confab, which also features Marina Abramović, Jeffrey Deitch, Marc Spiegler, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, as well as cyborg artists (“an art movement where artists express themselves through new senses created by the union between cybernetics and their organism,” according to the newspaper of record), sheikhs, and corporate philanthropists, all in conversation with Times journalists Roger Cohen, Robin Pogrebin, and Farah Nayeri. The convener of the event is Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani — chairman of Qatar Museums Authority, sister of the country’s emir, and 
one of the world’s wealthiest art collectors.

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