In October, Phillips de Pury & Company set up shop in Dubai with Lulu Al-Sabah as its first director for the Middle East, to be based in Kuwait and London. The 29-year-old former journalist has a profile to match the region’s young, diasporic art market: Born in New York, raised primarily in Kuwait—where she is a member of the royal family—and later educated in Europe and the U.S., Al-Sabah spent two years as a consultant in the region for Christie’s before joining Phillips, for whom she will oversee two major sales a year.

Al-Sabah’s present and former employers both have offices in the Dubai International Financial Centre. Because of her heavy travel schedule, though, she won’t be getting a whole lot of face time with her current bosses. Al-Sabah expects plenty of meetings with Arab and Iranian collectors in Europe, and, having visited Beirut, Damascus and Tehran since being named to the post, she now has her sights set on North Africa as well. “People in the Middle East tend to want to meet you first, before they do business with you,” she explains. “You can’t just conduct relationships by e-mail and over the phone.”

In this part of the world, Al-Sabah concedes, national loyalties loom large. But unlike Sotheby’s, which devotes a sale to modern and contemporary Arab and Iranian works in London, Phillips sells regional and international art side by side in Dubai. “That’s what I love about Phillips,” she says.  “Contemporary art is first, nationality second.” She notes that hers will be the first auction house in the emirate to sell Russian works; South Asian art may be next.

Unperturbed by the global economic downturn, Al-Sabah (who recently gave birth to her first child) points to the two-year-old fair Art Dubai and the long-term culture-building projects going on in Abu Dhabi and Qatar, where Sotheby’s has its regional office, as evidence of the Middle East’s serious commitment to establishing an art market. Oil, she adds, will continue to enrich the region for the foreseeable future: “At the moment, people are more reluctant to spend their cash.But I think there will be money here for a long time coming.” 

"Royal Welcome" originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's December 2008 Table of Contents.