Dubai street art gallery plays its trump card

Card game lovers can get their hands on their very own pack of gold-plated playing cards right here in the UAE.

The gold playing cards for sale in Dubai. Pawan Singh / The National
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There is little that can sum up a city more than a pack of gold-plated playing cards. So you may not be surprised there are three varieties of gold-plated cards currently on sale in Dubai.

You can pay Dh375 for the 24-carat coated cards in a beautiful wooden box, Dh250 for cards with Dubai landmarks on the back and Dh110 for cards with a US dollar on the reverse. And the cards are easy to find - they are available from The Smoker’s Centre – a speciality store for tobacco, cigarettes, cigars and smoking accessories – in the UAE’s malls.

One owner of the 24-carat version is Stéphane Valici, the curator of a new gallery, Street Art Dubai, that opened last month on Jumeirah Beach Road in Jumeirah 1. The gallery, as its name suggests, will be solely concentrated on street art, and Mr Valici bought a pack of the cards to display in the run-up to the gallery’s launch to help market the opening on social media.

Street art is the term for an art form that has found itself moved from the very edges of society, a subversive and anonymous act of public disobedience to the heart of the mainstream coveted, appraised and auctioned. The days of graffiti as a rebellion are long gone, now it’s a career.

Banksy, the most famous, most collectable, and still, as he hangs on to his anonymity, the enfant terrible of the street art milieu sees art as a form of political discourse and a simple way of highlighting society’s contradictions.

But once a street artist has his or her art hanging inside a home or a gallery surely it’s no longer street and therefore not what it says it is?

Banksy is supposed to be worth about US$20 million after the massive success of his artwork. This is, apparently, a cause for moral dilemma for him, as he has stated: “Commercial success is a mark of failure for a graffiti artist.”

ascott@thenational.ae

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