If my first The Human Centipede: A View From the Art World (2013) traced the art world as a closed alimentary circuit, this sequel begins where that circuit was sublimated into brokerage as a state-form with unmistakable political aspirations.[1] The same logic is now in the open for everyone to witness, wearing the grimace of geopolitical strife and solidarity. With establishing its own Art Basel franchise and a brand new Pavilion in Giardini della Biennale, Qatar, this new host of the human centipede, condenses its procedures, translating the art world’s internal value metabolism into an external regime of access and unequal development and toward a brokered Middle East between Gulf Futurism and violent Islamism that would put even the Western imperial imagination to shame.
Years ago, returning from Kathmandu and too sick to eat or drink after weeks of near-death experience, my wife and I found ourselves in a nearly empty business-class lounge. One man sat there. A sheikh, who introduced himself as the lover of art and everything artistic, including Iranian antique rugs. He and his wife were traveling to Kashan, Iran, to profess their appreciation of the latter. My wife encountered, in the restroom, his fully veiled partner, decked out in Hermes and Cartier, who introduced herself in the utmost hospitality as a family friend of the American ambassador in Qatar. ‘You are going to Iran?’—‘Yes.’ A small exchange of niceties followed—polite, efficient, without any density beyond the correctness of tone. Then, an offer appeared, delivered as if it were simply a protocol for the VIP-minded denizens of the Middle East: ‘If you ever come to Qatar, we can host you,’ they said. ‘We belong to the nobility and are close to the royal family, so there would be no visa issues for your husband.’
A detail that matters, because it already contains the logic of the entire scene. We were forced to fly business class because, apparently, the economy was completely booked. Once boarded, we noticed that a significant portion of the economy was empty. In other words, the declared scarcity turned out to be fictitious. But nonetheless, it functioned well, precisely since it compelled an upgrade into a mediated space of privilege mid-air existing atop the constant production of unreal constraint that is operationally enforceable at the moment of enforcement.
On the flight, wine of the year and roasted almonds were served. I touched neither, because my body was not cooperating with the luxury flight ritual when it had wasted itself to half of its former mass. The couple sat behind us. Nothing more was said. However, when the plane landed, whatever recognition had briefly existed evaporated. There was no rupture, no insult, and no scene, only polite disappearance without goodbye or eye contact. The offer of hospitality did not need to be retracted openly because it had never been a serious commitment to begin with. It was a well-curated gesture, a performance of generosity that remained reversible so long as the conditions of its understanding remained favorable. Once Iran, the country, became tangible not as a destination printed on a boarding pass but as a geopolitical position, the human surface closed without drama, as if the earlier exchange had been a small atmospheric anomaly and the cabin had returned to its final state of equilibrium.
This form of hollow hospitality had a name we can neither call misunderstanding nor cultural difference. We, Farsi speakers, call insincere claims or offers ‘mid-air’ (rou-hava) as the punchline of our jokes. In this form of congenial hospitality recognition operates as a conditional signal instead of an ethical act. Not to mention that intimacy is resorted to as a reversible condition designed to kill durable proximity. The point here is not personal grievance, and it is not the banal discovery of shared racism in the Middle East of which Iran is also a part as such. What appears as etiquette is often a calibrated mechanism for smooth encounters as the true currency of the fundamentally brokered systems of our time. You are seen while you are potentially useful, you are conversed with while you are a plausible element in someone’s imagined map of affiliations, and lastly, you are quietly derecognized once you become a point of friction in the actual map of alignments.
We begin here because the installation of an Art Basel franchise in Doha, Qatar, can be understood through precisely this logic, and a thing far worse, that cannot be captured by the usual critique of soft power and cultural diplomacy. All in all, the Qatar state represents the worst unique forms of corruption and hypocrisy. It’s not just that Qatar’s entire sovereignty is defined by the logic of brokerage but that the place also functions as a Potemkin village of Islamic governance, a remarkable inversion machine, whose function is to appear as the civilized, hospitable, avant garde face of political Islam precisely by funding its most nefarious implementations elsewhere. For decades, this small peninsula has bankrolled the most insidious forms of Islamist terror in the region: the Taliban, ISIS, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood in its post-Arab Spring diaspora and post-Takfiri coolness in Syria, and, since the Saudi-led embargo of the country in 2017, the murderous mullahs in Iran. Qatar’s sovereign wealth has been flowing outward to arm the Muslim world with weapons and ideology, while the image that is projected back is sanitized, akin to a museum-ready air-conditioned nightmare. What Western liberals encounter when they arrive in Doha is not an alternative Islamic modernity but the negative image of the carnage their hosts finance across the border, a photograph developed calculatedly not even in blood, but according to the press release, in oxidizable iron-rich protein inside red blood cells to come off as more sanitary on glossy paper.
When the art world becomes a cartographic apparatus, namely a machine for remapping geopolitical disorder into cultural legibility, the industry’s nauseating cynicism deepens accordingly. What in 2013 could still be treated primarily as financial cynicism—critique as added value, theory as exclusive features (as in luxury cars), politics as a lifestyle option, interesting perspective as an IPO—has now become cartographic cynicism, in which the core operation is the conversion of geopolitical posturing into soft regional supremacy and a form of reputational insulation that goes hand in hand with Qatar’s successful past policy of strategic ambiguity. The art world today is less invested in selling objects than in selling maps (preferably with the people that such maps vaguely represent) to the highest bidder, and selling maps is not a metaphor here. Because it denotes the production of a hidden moral geography in which certain nodes become inevitable, certain alignments become background, and catastrophes become interesting contexts to be navigated.
By cartographic cynicism, I mean the systematic pulverization of antagonism into atmosphere, atmosphere painted as complexity, complexity into brokerage, brokerage into culture, and culture into insulating self-defence of the Qatari State in the last instance. This is a situation in which cultural form no longer primarily mediates between artist and spectator, but between geopolitical position and financial power, so that a state can appear as a cultural necessity rather than a political abnormality in the modern world, and so that the art world can appear as a critical exterior while functioning as a soft and cushy interior. Contemporary art’s favored fantasy—its structurally necessary self-image—is that it hovers above geopolitics, occasionally dipping in to comment, mourn, or protest.
Doha matters, then, not because it is uniquely corrupt, and not because it is uniquely hypocritical, but because it is structurally explicit. Qatar is a well-entrenched and, in fact, crystal-clear broker-state that is a host of the worst strains of both Islamism and Islamophobia: a political form whose primary achievement is to remain necessary to incompatible parties. Brokerage here is both an auxiliary function and, at the same time, the very definition of a makeshift sovereign identity. For Qatar, mediation is no longer a tactic of survival among hostile neighbors, but a global brand or a franchise for regional stability. In the same vein, transit through Qatar is not only a logistical condition but a metaphysics of the broker’s mentality where coherence is sacrificed at the altar of indispensability. Indispensability today requires cultural presence, not culture as risk or interruption, but culture as a gulf-perfumed interface, because hosting turns judgment into impoliteness and reframes criticism as an inability to appreciate the so-called cultured nuances. Hosting is, therefore, both a decorative armature to the existence of a confident power and a defensive-offensive technology, passive-aggressively glossing over the guest’s discomfort with facts, so that it becomes reluctant to name the host as a problem.
This is where the political and psychological economies of brokerage offer a lexicon suitable for this critique without turning the text into an academic drudgery. Brokers are not neutral intermediaries who merely connect domains that already exist. Why? Because brokerage produces legibility, and legibility is itself a form of power.[2] Brokerage configures space, and it shapes how margins become readable to centers, how peripheries become the subject of investment, how contradictions are managed, and how the very distinction between center and periphery is reproduced by regulating the terms of access and the rationing of visibility. Accordingly, brokerage seems to operate between given geographies while in reality it aims to produce new geographies itself. This is why the language of ‘remapping’ is not merely rhetorical in the Art Basel Qatar’s curatorial statement.[3] In this sense, Doha isn’t just emerging as a new and hip art center but is joining Western and democratic political actors, which are granting it a global status through laundering both money and political convenience. Legitimacy here is a valuable asset—one that effectively and in quasi-Machiavellian fashion heightens the already high cost of dissent.
If legibility is the primary political good in brokered systems, then Art Basel Qatar can be called a legibility engine, a (golden) visa for reputations. This is why the correct methodological stance has to include tactical ignorance, in the precise sense articulated in the original essay I wrote in 2013: one does not need to see the show, because in the contemporary art world, the press release already provides the terms of integration, the axioms under which everything becomes exchangeable, and the conceptual fog that substitutes for decision. The press text is the show’s minimum viable ontology, the mold into which works, gestures, false solidarities, and controversies are poured so that the whole can circulate without friction. If the works exceed the text, they exceed it under an enforced ceiling funded by the very shady actors Qatar is in broker-friendship with. If the text does not reflect the real premises, that is worse, not better, because it means the alibi is interchangeable and, therefore, functional only as an alibi.
The theme offered for the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar is Becoming. Becoming is what a laundering mechanism calls itself when it wants a curator’s blessing. We are told that the fair is a meditation on humanity’s ongoing transformation and the evolving systems that shape how we live, believe, and create meaning. Moreover, we are told that the Gulf is a ‘living palimpsest’ where oral traditions intersect with digital networks and where ancient trade routes are reimagined as contemporary flows of culture and capital. Finally, we are told that art becomes a vital conduit for translating systemic shifts into form. The point is not that these phrases are wrong in some narrow, dim-witted factual sense, but that they do not describe anything at all. They license the old alimentary circulation without even bothering to mask it from public view. Their function is to produce a conceptual atmosphere in which mere proceeding is the evidence of seriousness, while the infrastructural questions that would otherwise force hidden alignments into view are dissolved back into the vocabulary of palimpsest, flow, and becoming. In this respect, becoming is a solvent like paint thinner, the very enzyme of the stomach, that makes excrement for one into food for the other.
One can treat this conceptual framing as a set of axioms and see its operational intent immediately. If the Gulf is a palimpsest, then overwriting becomes an object of admiration as a magic wand for erasure. Here, contradictions parade as aesthetically pleasing textures, and layering them replaces accountability or their synthesis, because a palimpsest invites awe and wonder at the coexistence of inscriptions rather than an inquiry into who is doing the overwriting and who is being overwritten or completely erased. The minute trade routes are reimagined as flows of culture and capital, boring logistics are elevated to the level of haphazard pseudo-poetry, which is to say that energy corridors, weapons pipelines, financial and security infrastructures dissolve into liquid metaphors that feel cosmopolitan insofar as they refuse to name the hard geometry of power they conceal. If art is a conduit, then it’s defined as a carrier rather than an interrupter, and a conduit does not decide. A rectum is not a brain, for it transmits and facilitates passage. It makes passage look like a virtue after two weeks of severe Kathmandu-stricken diarrhea. Finally, if everything is becoming, then nothing has arrived, and, therefore, nothing can be judged. The fair, the state, the region, and the Islamist ideology behind and in front of it, together with the supposed solidarities, are transitional positions—evolving and unfinished—which is the most convenient ontological posture for the most powerful broker-state in the Middle East and for a global art apparatus that prefers to interpret its own continuity as an alimentary depth.
Taken together, these axioms, while sounding philosophical, are in fact nothing but a lubrication system, rendering the region as a dynamic cultural landscape instead of its truth as a field of violent antagonisms, converting political fracture into cultural texture, and providing a justification for the host to treat our demand for accountability as a lack of sophistication. This is what neo-orientalism looks like when updated in accordance with the politics of global contemporary taste. The older Orientalism depicted the East as timeless, but the update depicts it as layered, fluid, and metabolically hybrid—a palimpsest, in which contradictions are beautiful, and everything intersects—a region whose coherence is not required because incoherence is successfully marketed as excremental complexity. The critical problem is not that this language is too generic, although it is, but that its genericity is precisely what makes it superbly effective: it can be applied anywhere, it can absorb any controversy as context, and it can function as a template for cultural remapping through which the absence of a united political front is replaced by the image of unity staged as the real cultural vibe of a region and religion in conflict, if not contradictory.
This is what makes Art Basel Qatar categorically different from the usual artworld compromises with capital and state. The critique of contemporary art as soft power, as a laundering mechanism, and as a respectability lubricant remains necessary, but they are not sufficient for explaining Qatar’s Islamist sorcery. What opens in Doha tomorrow is no longer an art fair servicing a broker-state but a cultural spectacle erected atop an ongoing crime against humanity, a pavilion lit with the electricity of contrast and under garish acoustic effects and fireworks. Who said that the hypocritical contrast between Gaza and Doha cannot be converted positively, extracting value from image differentials? The arbitrage involved in showing Picasso, Basquiat, Philip Guston and Marlene Dumas at Art Basel Qatar in the smart-city glitter of Doha overshadowing the rubble of what Qatari money and influence produces just about everywhere else in the Muslim world. Let’s call Gulf futurism for what it is in the most candid way. It is a gated negativity and an Islamic Elysium in the desert whose luxury is insured by keeping the catastrophe away across the waters in Iran, Gaza, and Yemen, visible from the marina only if one squints enough to see a future that, in the words of William Gibson, is designed to be distributed unequally through ‘the flows of culture and capital.’
Consider the hard-to-stomach materiality of this farcical display of sordid flaunting. Qatar shares its primary gas and oil reserves with Iran, the South Pars / North Dome field being the largest natural gas field on the planet. Under international sanctions, Iran cannot extract its share at competitive rates, cannot access the technology, and is unable to sell freely on global markets. Qatar exploits this asymmetry systematically and superb calculation, drawing extra resources way over half from a shared reservoir while Iranian people hemorrhage under sanctions and underdevelopment, using the proceeds of this unfair extraction, which is to say resources that belong to the Iranian people, to simultaneously prop up the Islamic Republic diplomatically and position itself as its civilized and advanced alternative. The wealth that builds the museums, that funds the art fair, and that erects the hospitality industry–including the multi-billion so-called terror-hospitality enterprise complex called Qatar Airways–is possible by taking advantage of a neighbor’s political quarantine and go full necro-financing on the corpses of other people. And with this stolen or rather hard-earned wealth, Qatar constructs the image of what Islam could be if only it were not, over there, so embarrassingly shady, so unmanageably chaotic, so aesthetically displeasing to Western curatorial sensibilities.
This is why the timing of Art Basel Qatar cannot be treated as incidental context but must be understood as constitutive of its very function. Just a few weeks ago, the Islamic Republic of Iran conducted a nationwide, coordinated massacre of its own population: gunshot wounds to the head and torso, forced disappearances, bans on gatherings, attacks on mourning families, and the extortionate practice of demanding the price of the bullet from those who wished to retrieve their dead. Tens of thousands killed. Just across the Persian Gulf, protected by the American naval presence that secures both the Gulf states and Israel, Qatar prepares to host the art world for an alcohol-free, modesty-compliant celebration of Islamic contemporary culture. The river of blood flows on one shore; the mocktails flow on the other. This is not hypocrisy in any moralistic sense, because hypocrisy would imply a gap between statement and action that the actor wishes to conceal. What Qatar performs is something more systematic and let’s say, genius in its unsavory logic. It is the production of an image whose legibility depends on the illegibility of the stolen wealth that funds it and the political Islamism it funds, the construction of a civilizational brand whose value is openly indexed to the ruthlessness it sponsors and from which it attempts to distinguish itself.
And what of the Western gallerists, curators, collectors, critics, institutional leaders, and the art world that will board flights to Doha and submit to the supra-Islamic codes of conduct, the modesty requirements, the prohibition on public displays of affection, and the alcohol-free networking events? What has happened to the libidinal economy of the art fair, to the minor and major transgressions that constitute its daily liturgy, to the intoxication that facilitates its social machinery? The answer is that none of it has disappeared. They have simply been suspended in exchange for access, and the suspension is itself the initiation rite. This is how criminal organizations operate Mafia-like: they require new members to perform something compromising, something that binds them to the enterprise through shared complicity. The conduct code functions as a loyalty test, as behavioral Golden Visa pre-clearance for the western cultural elite, as proof that power is the endgame of autonomy and that the art world’s self-portrait as a space of transgressive freedom was always merely what it could afford under more permissive jurisdictions. To attend Art Basel Qatar in compliance with its codes is to become an accomplice, not an innocent bystander, not an ignorant observer, but by all critical and definitions, a participant in a system whose legitimacy one’s presence actively produces.
One must be precise about what is truly pitiful in this scene, because imprecision allows escape into the usual alibis of cultural exchange and dialogue. What is distressing is not that Westerners are attending an art fair in a Muslim country, nor that they are respecting local customs as guests. What is wretched is the specifically liberal character of their self-abasement, which comes down to the reduction of their own stated principles to negotiable preferences, and the discovery that their commitments to bodily autonomy and expressive freedom were never commitments at all but bloatware that persisted in the absence of sufficient incentive to abandon them. The alcohol-free art parties of Doha are not just a minor inconvenience, but the ritualized self-humiliation of liberalism, a performance of the proposition that everything the West has historically claimed as their intrinsic values can be suspended for the right price, and that the right price turns out to be embarrassingly low. If only the Islamic Republic could buy a share of them cheaply before the systematic massacre of their own people. How low has the West sunk? Low enough to enjoy this. Low enough to comply without hesitation and to treat the modesty codes as an interesting cultural experience rather than as what they actually are.
Meanwhile, from this same city, this same country, the October 7 operation was coordinated by Hamas leadership living in Qatari luxury. The tunnels were partly built with Qatari money. The weapons were partly purchased with Qatari facilitation. And not once in the decade of preparation did any Qatari condition attached to this funding stipulate that perhaps Hamas should also build bomb shelters for the civilian population of Gaza, should stockpile food and medicine and water, should prepare for the inevitable Israeli retaliation by doing something, anything, to protect the innocent people in whose name it claims to fight. But of course, that was never the point for this specific neo-Middle Eastern false-futuristic mindset. The point was always the contrast. Qatar does not just broker between incompatible parties, for it produces the incompatibility that turns brokerage into arbitrage, funds the crises from which it then profits, amassing power as the mediator, feeding the radical Muslims around the world like tree logs to the wood chipper machinery of Western and Israeli anti-terrorism, when they finally stop murdering non-Muslims and non-believers in the name of God.
Art Basel Qatar is interfaced by the Egyptian artist Wael Al Shawky, whose reputation in the international art world serves acutely as the kind of legitimacy cover that such operations require. But Al Shawky’s curatorial role involves something that has not been adequately named so far: censorship by invitation. Each gallery participating in Art Basel Qatar is permitted to bring works by only one artist, and that artist has been handpicked by Shawky and perhaps his state-sponsored intelligence team. To put it mildly, this is not curation by even the most seedy standards of the art world but pre-selection as a preventive exclusion mechanism, a filtering apparatus that ensures nothing too friction-generating enters the venue while maintaining the appearance of artistic choice. The good name of a respected artist masks the regime under which no work can even accidentally break the political or religious taboos in Qatar, while maintaining the atmosphere of civilized exchange, so that the broker-state of Qatar receives its cultural dividend without any embarrassing incident.
And then there is the scene of Arab and Muslim artists and intellectuals gathering to legitimate this operation, to mingle with the rulers who fund it and fund them, to officiate as cultural referees whose presence certifies the event as serious, and worthy of the newly decolonized Art Basel. This is the scene that should be named for what it is in this day and age: the Islamist art washing. The presence of Arab and Muslim artists and intellectuals provides the authentication that Western participation alone cannot, by itself, supply. It is to say, with one’s presence, that this is legitimate, that this represents us, that the sponsors of this fair are patrons of culture rather than merchants of catastrophes. The bootlicking involved is not metaphorical by any means, for it is a precise description of the postural requirements for participation in broker-state cultural arbitrage, the ugly bending required to slide through the door that leads to funding, visibility, and career advancement.
It is important to remind you that Art Basel Qatar is merely the introduction, the opening act for something even more politically obscene and ethically cringeworthy. This prize has to be saved for Qatar’s purchase of a permanent national pavilion in the Giardini of the Venice Biennale. For decades, the Giardini’s geography was considered a closed canon, its borders frozen since the last addition in 1995. Until Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani leveraged a multi-million euro restoration pledge to the City of Venice, presented it as a gift to the city of Venice, and the frozen geography of the garden suddenly thawed for precisely one new entrant.
Even Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with all their wealth and ambition, could not obtain their pavilions in the Giardini. Qatar could, because Qatar understood that investing millions directly into the municipality of Venice was a good price for the greatest militaristic omni-balancing and necro-finance operation in art history: the money came attached to a relationship, to future considerations, to the soft integration of Venice into the Qatari sphere of cultural and perhaps political influence. Indeed, the golden Lion of the upcoming edition ought to be handed to Qatar for successfully completing the largest single act of art-world bribery in history, with the pavilion standing as a permanent monument to the proposition that everything in the West is for sale, including the spatial power of its most prestigious cultural institutions. But what can one expect from Venice?
Qatar now functions as the place where liberal food-court multiculturalism appears to actually work, where the contradictions dissolve into hospitality, luxury, and a perfectly micro-managed atmosphere filled with positive vibes. The visitor arrives in February, the climate is ideal, the service is impeccable, the architecture is impressive, and the host asks nothing except compliance with modest behavioral requirements that can be framed as cultural respect and the law of the land. Under these conditions, it becomes possible to forget, or rather to never know or learn, what the host is simultaneously funding while making the Takfiri cult cool again (necktie wearing Jihadis anyone?). This food court offers many options, but plurality in a Potemkin village is only part of the scenery, a cheesy mural facade of diversity that conceals the singularity of the operation.
And all of this proceeds in a geopolitical window dressing whose volatility cannot be ignored. Only if Trump can delay bombing Iran until after February 7, the fair can proceed smoothly, as requested privately by Qatar. If the American administration can be convinced to hold its fire for a few more days, the parties can proceed on schedule. And who cares if this bought time allows the murderers in Tehran to move their weapons around, to prepare their defenses, to hide their assets, or to escape with suitcases of money to Moscow? The art fair requires stability, while stability necessitates the postponement of history; the postponement that benefits the very regime that easily massacres its own population. This is what brokerage looks like when it acquires grotesque metamorphosized cultural organs: not the prevention of violence but its temporal management, and surely, not the critique of power but the scheduling of its operations around the art-world calendar. The fair opens; the bombs can wait; the families of the Iranian dead can wait; everything can wait except the cultural legitimation of the broker-state, which must proceed on schedule because schedules are what separate and unite, to use Walter Benjamin’s terminology, civilization versus barbarism.
More than a decade ago, I described as the human centipede, the art world as a controlled and closed alimentary circuit that increasingly looked like a segmented organism composed of mouths and rectums, each feeding the next, each converting waste into value, value into legitimacy, legitimacy into further waste. It was primarily driven by a dynamic gastroenterologists call, Peristalsis, namely, the automatic wave-like muscle contractions which end up in excremental relief. That diagnosis remains correct, but sadly, it is no longer sufficient. The centipede has not merely persisted for it has now acquired organs of state and has undergone a metamorphosis, from Switzerland as a model of passive fence-sitting and a financial fortress for the unscrupulous to Qatar as the paradigm of active omni-balancing among questionable actors and the engineer of exotic authoritarian small-statecraft as the ultimate model of an Islamic Switzerland with a venomous bite as it now primarily functions through leveraged interests that convert war and peace themselves into finance and speculative risk investment.
This essay is not a sort of critique that the art world can assimilate at whim. It is an indictment. It calls out as accomplices all those who organize this event, all those who attend it, all those who provide it with the legitimacy of their presence and the authentication of their reputations. It strives to expose the delinquent operation of a cultural apparatus that converts the massacre of Iranians into incidental background music for an Islamic art party, that transforms the rubble of Gaza into the contrast against which Doha’s architecture can appear modern and contemporary. There are no innocent bystanders in Doha in February 2026. There is only complicity distributed across a network of participants whose presence produces the legitimacy that the broker-state requires to continue operating. The human centipede is now digesting not merely the capacity for critique but the bodies of the dead, converting them into vibe, into interesting context, and the becoming that never arrives for those whose tomorrow have been allocated elsewhere, which is to say, into the feces that will be deposited down the throat of a future generation in the name of a new brokered Middle East whose peace is purchased with the corpses of those who could not afford the entry fee, but had to stay at the outskirts of the venue and if they could afford it, they can visit the McDonald’s instead.
[1] See R. Negarestani, The Human Centipede: A View From the Art World (2013) Online, Available at https://tripleampersand.org/the-human-centipede-a-view-from-the-art-world/.
[2] See for example the work of the famed anthropologist Mary Helms: M. W. Helms, Craft and the Kingly Ideal: Art, Trade, and Power (University of Texas Press, 1993).
[3] See Wael Shawky’s concept text here, online, available at https://www.artbasel.com/qatar/concept.