To enter oil-rich Abu Dhabi’s four-year-old Emirates Palace hotel is to experience ostentation on a disconcerting scale. Behold what $3 billion bought the local government: the soaring heights of 114 domes, the highest of them beating out St. Peter’s in Rome; the whooshing of 200 fountains, the glinting of 1,002 Swarovski crystal chandeliers; the warm glow that telegraphs outrageous riches, of walls and floors and ceilings in gold and marble and glass; the bustling activity in 128 kitchens and pantries; the near-constant tending of all of this by some 2,000 staff. To call it bling would be to vastly understate the matter, as would complaining that you feel a little lost in the place — it takes a full forty minutes to walk from one wing to the other — and a little insignificant. Throughout, an overriding message is conveyed: What’s happening here is far, far larger than you. And so, if you’d arrived at the palace last week, and thrown open, with some effort, its heavy glass doors, and slid your bag through an airport-style security check and encountered in its echoey lobby slickly-designed signage announcing that the brand new modern and contemporary art fair taking place inside, Abu Dhabi Art, is “the region’s most vibrant new art fair” and that it’s “taking art to a whole new space,” blinding splendor of the place is so blinding, its hugeness so aggressive, that you’d be pretty well ready to buy that line. I did.

“Taking art to a whole new space” is a clever slogan for Abu Dhabi Art, and while it doesn’t refer to the fair’s venue itself, it could be a wink in the direction of Abu Dhabi’s cultural ambitions. For the past two years, a similar November fair had been put on in the Emirates Palace, in collaboration with French fair Art Paris, but last June, in the throes of the global economic crisis, the French co-organizers postponed the 2009 edition. Not a month later, Abu Dhabi’s Tourism Development and Investment Company (TDIC) and the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) stepped up to announce that they would be taking over, bringing the fair in-house. TDIC is also responsible for the emirate’s uber-ambitious, starchitect-powered cultural complex on Saadiyat Island, which is to include a 450,000-square-foot, Frank Gehrydesigned Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and a 260,000-square-foot, Jean Nouveldesigned Louvre Abu Dhabi, both of which are intended to have permanent collections largely in place by the time of their public openings in 2012/2013. (The Louvre has already started amassing its collection, and in June, with French president Nicolas Sarkozy in attendance, unveiled 19 purchases at the Emirates Palace, including the Piet Mondrian painting Composition with Blue, Red, Yellow and Black (1922), which brought €21,569,000 ($27,908,129) at the Yves Saint Laurent sale at Christie’s Paris in February; the Guggenheim, however, according to director Richard Armstrong, is still forming its acquisitions committee.)

Imagine the number of modern masterpieces and cutting-edge contemporary artworks it will take to fill that kind of square footage! Dealers have, and that’s what lured 50 of the heaviest hitters to this fair. Note the boldface names the organizers secured, among them PaceWildenstein, Gagosian Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Thaddeus Ropac, and White Cube, all of them shipping in ultra-blue-chip items bearing price tags soaring well into the multiple millions of dollars, presumably with the hopes that these pieces would ultimately find their way to, well, “a whole new space.”

At least two pieces in Abu Dhabi Art threatened to out-bling the Palace. Posted at the entrance to White Cube’s booth, as though guarding it, was a self-portrait head by Marc Quinn in solid gold, priced at $3 million. Kitty-corner from it, chez Gagosian, was a gargantuan stainless steel sculpture of a red diamond by Jeff Koons, Diamond (Red) (2006), reported in the Financial Times to be priced around $12 million. (A similar piece sold at auction two years ago for $11.8 million.) Three men were seen pondering it on the fair’s opening day and, as though providing the punch line to a New Yorker cartoon, one pointed to another and said to the third, “He’s buying it for his new wife. She’s a sasquatch.” It was such visually seductive pieces, poised to catch the eye of the powers that be, that presumably prompted one dealer to observe, “This isn’t an art fair, it’s a beauty contest.”

TDIC and ADACH seemed determined, however, that audiences not get too distracted by the gleaming wares: Abu Dhabi Art was no mere commercial event, the organizers were at pains to emphasize in their press materials, but rather something more along the lines of a cultural platform, its four-day run packed with a full roster of exhibitions, panels, and design workshops. Marquee names dotted its patrons committee, including those of Jeff Koons; megacollector (and Christie’s owner) Francois Pinault; and architect Norman Foster, who is designing Saadiyat Island’s Sheikh Zayed National Museum. Key events on the schedule were ones that focused on the topics of collecting — the subject of a packed-house conversation between uberdealer Larry Gagosian, Qatar Museums Authority head Roger Mandle, and Iranian collector Farhad Farjam — and museum building — a talk featuring New York University museum studies professor Bruce Altschuler, Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong, Chicago collecting couple Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, and British dealer turned philanthropist Anthony D’Offay; an exhibition in the Emirates Palace’s gallery, “Guggenheim: Making of a Collection,” with works by the likes of Mondrian and Kandinsky, and another in an adjacent gallery devoted to models of the various structures intended for Saadiyat Island (you couldn’t miss the latter, if you followed the signs that said “Welcome to the future.”) Much, in other words, seemed geared toward keeping on message about the emirate’s cultural ambitions.

Certain sectors of the fair were overtly targeted to the largesse of either the ruling Al Nahyan family or the museum projects. Case in point, the “Special Exhibition,” a sprawling seven-dealer booth, and, minus three dealers, a reprisal of the “Project Moderne” organized by Paris dealer Daniel Malingue and put on at that city’s FIAC fair in October, where it was a big hit. In Abu Dhabi, it sported modern masterworks ranging from a small 1929 wire sculpture by Alexander Calder, from New York and Chicago gallery Richard Gray, priced at $2.5 million, to Francis Bacons eerie 1949 painting Head III, from New York’s Acquavella, ticketed at $20 million, with top-notch pieces by the likes of Warhol, Leger, and Cezanne sprinkled in. At FIAC, the Project Moderne took center stage; here it resembled many other booths, though more spacious and with multiple recessed rooms, and had to vie with the Palace architecture: at the center of its entrance sprouted one of the Palace’s hundreds of palm trees. The dealers, to their credit, took it in stride: “We told them we’d only do this if we could bring in the tree,” Acquavella’s Michael Findlay joked.

Next door, PaceWildenstein, which had Picassos 1950 painting Les Jeux in the “Special Exhibition,” had mounted a jewel-box-like show of Calder mobiles, ranging in price from $1.8 million to $18 million; parked behind the palace, on a manicured lawn fronting the beach, was the monumental Ordinary (1969), which had been installed outside New York’s Seagram Building last year. Priced at about $45 million, it cost Pace $100,000 to ship, a considerable investment in an emerging market. The Calders seemed to hit the right note. “It’s non-representational and has to do with a balance of forces,” mused Pace president Marc Glimcher. “It’s pretty Arabic, forces-of-nature type stuff.”

If some dealers had their eyes trained on Saadiyat Island, where construction on the Guggenheim’s Frank Gehry building had begun while the fair was on view, and where Jean Nouvel was on hand to explain how the “rain of light” system would function in the ceiling of his Louvre building, others weren’t hunting such big game. Ray Waterhouse of London gallery Waterhouse & Dodd said that he wasn’t “aiming at the museums” as much as some of the other galleries with bigger-ticket artworks. While he thinks the possibility of the museums buying was put out there in order to put the fair on a certain level, he believes its success ultimately depends on “individual collectors supporting it.” And to prove his point, he sold to them. Waterhouse brought art in the $5,000 to $1.1 million range, “with the vast majority of things below $50,000, and we’ve sold a lot of those to local people who have been surprised by the value we offer.” He says the gallery also received two commissions from government bodies, one of them a series on Abu Dhabi’s monumental Sheikh Zayed mosque by Jean-Francois Rauzier, who makes large, otherworldly, digitally altered photographs he calls “hyperphotos.” And Waterhouse sold four out of an edition of eight of one of Rauzier’s photos, for $24,800 apiece.

Waterhouse’s success can be attributed at least in part to his having stocked his booth with work by Middle Eastern artists like Youssef Nabil, whose striking, hand-colored photograph of artist Shirin Neshat sold for $12,500. Abu Dhabi Art had in common with other recently launched regional fairs the fact that work by artists from the region, even those who now live outside it, tends to sell well. Another piece by Nabil — a four-panel photograph — sold for $40,000 to a collector from Dubai at gallery the Third Line which, along with B21 and a few other galleries, made the one-hour drive from neighboring Dubai. (The commercial center of the United Arab Emirates, Dubai is generally considered to be the center of its art world, insofar as it sports a critical mass of contemporary art galleries and plays home to Christie’s auctions and an edgy four-year-old fair, Art Dubai; recent concerns about Dubai possibly defaulting or delaying payment on its debt, however, have raised questions about how sustainable its heady development has been. For an indication of possible trouble, see the stalled activity on multiple real estate ventures, the skyline dotted with inert cranes.) The Third Line also sold, to a collector from the region, a large, brand new drawing, priced at €12,000, by Laleh Khorranimian, an artist who featured in “Unveiled: New Art From the Middle East” last spring at London’s Saatchi gallery. B21 was graced with a visit on opening night from French megacollector and Christie’s owner Francois Pinault, who bought two sets of works on paper from a 2009 series called “Fictionville” by Iranian artist Rokni Haerizadeh, who also figured in Saatchi’s show.

I asked Third Line co-founder Sunny Rahbar whether Abu Dhabi Art stood to steal the spotlight from Art Dubai. “I think they are two very different fairs,” she said. “Dubai has a different vibe.” (It’s also privately held, as opposed to Abu Dhabi Art, which is now entirely government-run.) But does this region really need two internationally reaching fairs? After all, as Dubai and Abu Dhabi expand geographically, they are building toward each other. Rahbar says one person she spoke with had “the idea that the two fairs at some point combine forces.”

Throughout Abu Dhabi Art, there was strong interest in artists from the region. At London’s Paradise Row, an editioned installation by Moroccan-born Mounir Fatmi, whose work appeared in the Sharjah Biennial two years ago, was especially popular. Consisting of a pile of white construction helmets emblazoned with the names of philosophers, it was priced at £17,000, and three of the five editions sold during the fair, one to Rudy Weng, a German collector of contemporary Middle Eastern art, one to a young collector from Dubai, and the third to another collector based in the region, who also purchased a video piece by Fatmi. The third artwork by Fatmi on the gallery’s stand, a series of wall-mounted, circular metal blades bearing Arabic script, also sold, for €40,000, to an art adviser based in Europe. The gallery also sold two works by Shezad Dawood, an artist of Pakistani and Indian heritage based in London. These were wall-mounted sculptures made from handmade book frames, priced at £7,500 apiece; the buyer was unnamed. British artist Douglas White had made an artwork especially for the fair, a life-size palm tree constructed from bits of truck tires found on a road in Abu Dhabi. It also sold, for £15,000, and while gallery owner Nick Hackworth wouldn’t reveal the buyer, he did say the piece would stay in Abu Dhabi.

Iranian-born New York dealer Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller, who is well connected in the region and did the second edition of Art Paris, had a number of works by artists of Middle Eastern origin on offer. For “over $100,000,” she sold a 1973 sculpture by prominent Iranian-born Parvis Tanavoli to a collector from the Middle East; the sale marks a return home for the artwork, which Nelson Rockefeller acquired on a visit to Iran in the late 70s. She also sold two sculptures in the form of oil barrels by Shiva Ahmadi, a Tehran-born artist based in Detroit — which kind of brings the whole oil barrel thing full circle — priced at $14,000 for a black version and $16,000 for one in gold; they went to ADACH.

Hanging around Abu Dhabi Art, it was impossible not to speculate about what might end up on Saadiyat Island. In an ornate hall leading to the fair were displayed a handful of monumental canvases by the Chinese-born, Paris-based artist Yan Pei Ming, a series he’d done in response to the Mona Lisa; they’d been displayed in the Louvre’s Old Masters galleries last spring. Along with the artist himself, Marie Laure Bernardac, the Louvre’s curator of contemporary art was on hand to discuss the paintings. Would they be staying in Abu Dhabi? “You can say they’re staying here,” she said. (A representative at New York’s David Zwirner Gallery, which works with the artist, said discussions were under way with the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and that an acquisitions committee would meet in January.)

To keep from obsessing about Saadiyat, you could go to the Wings party, an extravaganza that took place one evening on an outdoor stage fronting the beach. Featuring musical performances, speeches, videos, and even fireworks (choreographed by French artist Loris Greaud), it was orchestrated by Beaux Arts magazine editor Fabrice Bousteau, who serves on the fair’s patrons committee, and who could be seen in the run up to the show, dashing between the stage and the palace, identifiable by his ever-present pork-pie hat. Bousteau was the curator, last year, of Chanel’s Mobile Art exhibition, a roving show in a spaceship-like structure designed by Zaha Hadid, and Wings made some of the same aesthetic missteps as that show — in the form of dramatically lit, hyperbolic earnestness.

One of the first acts in Bousteau’s show was Jeff Koons, who took the stage in a sharp designer suit to speechify, as words faded from the screen behind him that read “Jeff Koons Speaks. Just Listen,” the imperative tone of which prompted me to wonder whether we were permitted to do other things, such as breathe. Koons took the opportunity to defend Pop art against charges of commercialism. “Over the past couple of years,” he began, “every time you talk about Pop art, everybody thinks right away about money, they think it’s all about money, people want money, it’s about, you can do all these things, and Andy [Warhol] stood for ‘just make money.’ And I have to say I never picked up on any of that when I learned to love Warhol, and Pop.” A perhaps poignant message in the context of an art fair.

Throughout Wings, there was meant to have been food available by some celebrity chef or another, but it was tough to locate, and I had dinner at the Emirates Palace’s Lebanese restaurant, with a ad hoc group of art folk — Bradford Waywell from Zurich’s Galerie Gmurzynska; James Lindon from Pace; Norman Rosenthal, the former exhibitions secretary for the London’s Royal Academy; and Wasel Safwan, an artist from the neighboring city of Al Ain. We couldn’t get a seat on the restaurant’s terrace, which was packed with other art folk, having swiftly transformed itself into the UAE equivalent of bustling Basel’s Kunsthalle restaurant. White Cube’s Jay Jopling held court at one long table, Guggenheim adviser Tom Krens at another.

But the mood here wasn’t the buoyant one associated with Art Basel, where sales are generally made on the first day of the fair. Things here were considerably more tentative. And yet, as the fair closed, and shortly thereafter, dealers started getting word that sales had been made. At 9 p.m. on Sunday night, Thaddeus Ropac received confirmation that two artworks in his booth, a composition in mixed media on canvas by Philip Taaffe called Toledo and an as yet untitled 2008 metal sculpture by Tony Cragg, priced around $500,000, had sold to the TDIC. Ropac, who also made sales to private collectors over the course of the fair — a new piece by Farhad Moshiri went to a European collector on Moshiri’s waiting list for $180,000, and a collector in the region expressed serious interested in doing a 200-foot commission by Cragg — but the fact that these two pieces would be part of a public collection in Abu Dhabi made the fair for him. “If these two sales hadn’t taken place, we wouldn’t be as happy,” he said. “This is what we hoped for.”

The day after the fair closed, Paris dealer Enrico Navarra received confirmation that he’d sold a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, Prayer, for about $3.9 million, but admitted that he wasn’t sure precisely to whom it had gone, whether it was for the TDIC or the royal family’s personal holdings. Navarra thinks Abu Dhabi Art holds great promise, not just because of the museum developments, but because of other real estate developments in the region that will produce plenty of walls to fill. He added, “Twenty years ago something like this would have been much more difficult. But we’re in a global culture now. Think about it — they have Prada and Gucci stores here. And soon will have Chanel.” And PaceWildenstein sold one of their Calder mobiles, La Douche, for around $8.5 million; officially it went to a Middle Eastern entity, but it’s rumored to be intended for the Guggenheim.

A degree of opacity surrounded sales at the fair. Some dealers who admitted they’d sold to TDIC or ADACH would only do so sotto voce, pleading that the information be kept off the record. A press release distributed by the organizers after the fair listed a number of sales, including a de Kooning painting, Untitled XIII (1982) and a shiny Anselm Reyle, Untitled (2009), both from Gagosian, prefaced by the mention that “a high number of important purchases [were] made by various UAE public organizations and museums.” Presumably the veil will at some point be lifted, but that may not happen until 2013, when the lucky among us will make the pilgrimage to Saadiyat Island.

Even those dealers who were frustrated at making few sales, or were waiting for sales to be confirmed, should take a stoic attitude, says Ray Waterhouse. “The smart ones know that if they come here and support Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi will support them.”

Although London and Zurich gallery Hauser & Wirth sold several works, including a Subodh Gupta painting, which pre-sold for €250,000, a two-part blue-glass sculpture by Roni Horn that went for $1.2 million to an Asian collection, and, if the fair organizers’ press release can be trusted, a large abstract painting by Gerhard Richter, director Florian Berktold expressed a sentiment similar to Waterhouse’s: “This isn’t really about sales happening. It’s about learning how things work here. This fair has taught us patience.”

Patience with a system that remains in some ways intransigently sub rosa. It occurred to me at a certain point during my stay in Abu Dhabi that we art journalists from “the West” have become used to a certain degree of transparency in our art world. Here, you couldn’t be quite sure anything was what it seemed. Had sales happened? Yes, and no. Could prices really be confirmed? Sort of. Who sold what to whom? No comment. After a few days of badgering dealers with questions I realized that, far from being cagey, they might simply not know what precisely was going on, or when or if they would sell things. One evening a group of sheikhas made a tour of the fair, arriving at 11:30 p.m. and staying until around 2 a.m. (The UAE keeps late hours: The fair didn’t open until 4, and closed at 10, barring impending visits from sheikhs or sheikhas.) The next night dealers caught wind that a contingent of sheikhs would be coming by, and dutifully remained in their booths, only to have word spread an hour later that it was a false alarm. It all brought to mind that famous line from Milton, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

One day into the fair, I hurried over to the fair’s VIP lounge, or majlis, as it was called, for a scheduled interview with the formidable Rita Aoun-Abdo, head of the cultural division of TDIC, who, along with her counterpart at ADACH, Sami Al Masri, is as close as Abu Dhabi Art comes to having a director. I asked her if dealers had been given assurance of sales before the fair — a rumor that had been circulating among journalists. “No,” she insisted. “No one is going to say, we are committing to purchases. This cannot happen and did not happen and will not happen.” She had arrived two hours late for the interview. While I waited on a beachfront terrace behind the majlis, I gazed out at the preternaturally cerulean Arabian Sea, at a set of large Arabic characters, each the height of a tall man, painted white and set on white platforms floating about 20 feet from the shore. I’d been told they spelled out the names of hotels. As I watched, one that had been swaying back and forth vertiginously in the wind broke off, splashed into the water, slowly drifted downshore, beached, and was retrieved by two divers, who swam it back to its platform and gingerly re-placed it there. I stared at the fallen character, and the gaping hole in the text that it had previously filled by standing upright, the text that I couldn’t read. I poked around for a metaphor; none came to mind.