After a three-year hiatus due to the pandemic, Art Dubai is back.

Strictly speaking, she was already in 2021 when she played in a few well-ventilated tents in a "financial district".

But no one seems to fondly remember this episode as the art fair has returned to its old venue in the glamorous grounds of the resort of Madinat Jumeirah.

Putin's war of aggression against Ukraine plays almost no role here.

The United Arab Emirates are not taking part in the sanctions against Russian oligarchs and financial institutions.

As the "New York Times" reports, Russian billionaires like Andrei Skoch are now heading for Dubai as a safe haven and are already at anchor with their yachts.

Lena Bop

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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They were not visible at the fair, and galleries from Russia or the Ukraine are not represented either.

The Georgian gallery Art Beat from Tbilisi sent a sign of solidarity with the attacked country at the preview: it covered the table in its box with the Ukrainian flag, and the co-owner Natia Bukia wore blue and yellow.

Art Dubai itself has told The Art Newspaper that it will donate a quarter of proceeds from ticket sales to Ukrainian refugees.

This information was not widely disseminated.

In view of the joy of seeing each other again after the isolation experiences of the past few years, the more dominant topic of the fair is the lively discussed question of what our future relationship to the digital (art) world could look like. An entire section is dedicated to Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), those certificates for digital or physical works of art in blockchains that have been causing a stir for a while because they are traded for enormous amounts of money but only exist virtually.

The fact that this is perceived by many as a contradiction could also be felt at the fair at the stands, which are completely clad in black - which makes the section with seventeen participants seem like a materialized version of the Darknet.

“What exactly do you actually do?” is a frequently heard question that nobody needs to be ashamed of.

The "Global Art Forum" that accompanies the fair also tries to deal with topics such as regulation and taxation of the new market with a series of discussions.

Above all, says Shumon Bazaar, who is responsible for the program, it wants to demystify terms such as NFT, Web3 and cryptosphere.

However, most people are already much deeper into the digital sphere than they think.

"We've all been cyborgs for a long time," says Basar.