I really find the contrast between the austere, post-Protestant aesthetics of the Emiratis and the baroque sensibilities of the Saudis and Qataris to be very interesting. The Emiratis have thoroughly internalized the sleek, minimalist techno-aesthetic of liberal corporate globalism; an aesthetic of post-Protestant modernism. It shows in their furniture, architecture, urban planning, cultural branding, and even in their mosques. The visual language projects efficiency, restraint, speed, innovation, openness, disenchantment, scalability, abstraction, neutrality, and cosmopolitanism. Ornament is deliberately subdued in favor of post-symbolic function and visual clarity, a visual order of a design regime that privileges frictionless movement and seamless integration. This is an aesthetic of de-politicization: it seeks to render modernity beautiful without conflict, global capitalism not as ideology, but as inevitability. The Saudis, by contrast, and to some extent the Qataris, remain loyal to a postcolonial Middle Eastern baroque synthesis, one mainly of French/Italian influences that still retains the grammar of ancien regime absolutism. It is theatrically ornate, symbolically saturated, unapologetically opulent, marked by exuberant gold accents, grand arabesque patterns, and hierarchical spatial design. The interiors do not aim for efficiency; they are declarations of permanence, majesty, and dynastic gravitas. Here, power is not procedural but sovereign, a grand, sudden, and all-at-once spectacle rather than a process. Qatar mirrors this sensibility to a degree, but inflects it with a distinctively Francophone, globalist flair, blending opulence with some curatorial sophistication that I'm sure they have acquired from all of those educated Westerners they bribe. All in all, Arabs remain distinctly post-European, and it's too bad they never had any serious American intellectual or aesthetic influence when it mattered the most.
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