ABU DHABI—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 Gehry–designed Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and a 260,000-square-foot, Jean Nouvel–designed 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.”