FRANCE CONFIRMS NEW “LOUVRE” IN ABU DHABI

After months of rumors and a week of protests, the French government has finally confirmed that in exchange for a sum said to be eight hundred million to one billion dollars, it will rent the name, art treasures, and expertise of the Louvre to a new museum to be built in Abu Dhabi, reports the New York Times‘ Alan Riding. A formal agreement is expected to be signed later this month, with the new “Louvre”—one of five museums planned for a multibillion-dollar tourist development on Saadiyat Island, off Abu Dhabi—to open in 2012. Critics of the plan—some twenty-four hundred, in hopes of scuttling the deal, signed a petition accusing France of “selling its soul”—have been dismissed as “grumpy spirits” by the French culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres.