A little bit of Hoxton in Dubai, The Times

What sold at the first Gulf Art Fair? Gavin Turk’s prized rubbish bags or a gun-wielding terrorist Snoopy? David Rose reports

Wealthy Emiratis in flowing robes, homesick expatriates and even visiting Premiership footballers were in buying mood at the inaugural Gulf Art Fair in Dubai. But despite a strong presence from international galleries, the heaviest spending was not on Western art but on Asian and Middle Eastern pieces.

Soaring oil prices and a construction boom mean that potential art investors (whether local sheikhs or hedge-fund managers) are plentiful in the Gulf, and at the beach-side fair 38 galleries from Delhi to New York were all eager to cash in, presenting works worth a total of $1 billion (£517 million) for sale in the first event of its kind in the Middle East.

The dollar sign was a conspicuous emblem throughout, whether embossed on a lurid silkscreen by Andy Warhol, contorted into a sculpture by Keith Haring or, more resonantly, forming a mould filled with crude oil by the Russian artist Andrei Molodkin.

Yet the fair’s organisers predict that Dubai’s wealth and location is well suited for culture as well as profits. They claim that the desert back-water-turned-commercial hub — although now best known for its hotels, golf courses and low taxes — could become “the most important centre for contemporary art in Asia, likely to rival London and New York within a decade”.

The boast befits a city with the audacity and wealth to build what is soon to be the world’s tallest building, the Burj Dubai tower, already 110 storeys and rising. But for all the Emirate’s aspirations to form a bridge between East and West, cultural tensions were apparent even before the fair’s opening.

Restrictions imposed on the exhibitors, including the White Cube and Albion galleries from London, meant that only art deemed suitable for exhibition in an Islamic state would be accepted. “We asked all galleries to make careful provision — that is, chiefly concerning nudity and religious imagery,” says John Martin, the fair’s director, who has established the project from nothing more than a beachside dream in less than two years. “Selling is the name of the game here, and in our first year there is a bit of a pioneer spirit, but already we hope next year to double in size.” The financial clout of the commercial art galleries causes a trickle-down effect to improving public institutions, Martin argues, and recent multimillion-pound sales of contemporary art by Christie’s and Sotheby’s in Dubai and its neighbour, Abu Dhabi, have been followed by plans for new showcases for the Louvre and Guggenheim collections in the region.

Buyers included Sol Campbell, the former England defender, who spent $60,000 (£31,000) on a photographic print of a forest by the Korean artist Bien-U-Bae while visiting the fair between training sessions at Portsmouth Football Club’s nearby camp.

Works such as Horse Mountain by Tim Flach, a close-up photograph of a stallion’s neck, were also particularly popular thanks to local interest in horse racing. But with only a handful of local galleries represented in the region and many visitors with no previous experience of negotiating such an event, experienced British, German and American dealers were bemoaning a lack of buzz.

Unlike in the current Moscow biennale, where the star billing of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and others has somewhat eclipsed local artists, the word in Dubai was that even those works by fashionable Westerners that were passed fit by the censor remained on the shelves, while those by their Arab peers, and Indian and Chinese artists, sold strongly among the Emirate’s 80 per cent expatriate population.

Graham Steele, sales executive at White Cube, said he had watched puzzled visitors carefully stepping over a sculpture of painted bronze rubbish bags by Gavin Turk, only to be confronted by a medicine cabinet by Hirst with a price tag of £825,000.

“Some visitors have become quite frustrated when trying to understand how such a thing can be worth thousands of pounds,” he said. “It has been quite an exciting challenge for us to have to explain the work and its context of art history.”

The Hoxton gallery was not alone in finding it hard to eke out a sale, highlighting a lack of understanding of modern Western art. Sotheby’s even ran an “education programme”, a series of talks at the fair aimed at introducing Arab buyers to the market. Whether this patronised local sheikhs was open to question.

But having secured a visit from Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and his ministers, Martin says: “It was disappointing to see the Culture Minister, who was fantastic in supporting the fair and is a great collector of Arabic calligraphy, only buying art of that kind, with many local buyers following suit.

“It’s like only supporting your own team in what could be a more interesting international competition.”

Indifference to Western culture verged into antipathy elsewhere in the fair, however. A solid gold knuckle-duster, designed by the London-based Pakistani artist Shezad Dawood, was encrusted with diamonds arranged to spell out “Nation of Islam” in Arabic. “Yes, it’s a bit edgy,” said Claudia Cellini, director of the Third Line gallery in Dubai. The work, she said, was bought by a local sheikh for nearly £9,000.

“He’s one of our fundamentalist clients,” her assistant joked, while standing next to another of Dawood’s works, a 6in high Snoopy doll dressed as a terrorist. Cellini corrects her: “He is, shall we say, conservative.” As a group of Emirati women in black burkas strolled past, eyeing with suspicion a nearby car decorated with Hirst’s trademark coloured spots, it was difficult to feel that the clash of civilisations had yet been overcome.