GERMAN MUSEUM CHIEF CRITICIZES LOUVRE’S ABU DHABI PLANS

The president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, has criticized France’s decision to lend both the Louvre’s name and its art to a planned museum in Abu Dhabi, claiming that the maneuver will lead to a “commercialization” of national treasures, reports Bloomberg‘s Catherine Hickley. Abu Dhabi’s “artificial global art capital in the desert sands” will attract only “jet-set tourists” and won’t contribute to international cultural exchange, Lehmann wrote in an article in Die Süddeutsche Zeitung. France plans to loan artworks from its national collections to the Abu Dhabi museum, which has yet to be built, and lend the Louvre’s name for a set period of time. The proposal has sparked protests, with more than forty-five hundred people signing a petition against what they term a pawning of French cultural heritage.