Judging from the fervor over France’s recent agreement with the United Arab Emirates to build a Middle Eastern branch of the Louvre, one might think that Philippe de Champaigne’s Ex Voto had been auctioned off to a class of finger-painting first graders. The reality: over thirty years, the UAE will pay the French government $1.3 billion. In exchange, the Louvre will lend its name and selected works, for up to two years at a time, to a new museum opening in Abu Dhabi after 2012.

The situation is mutually beneficial. Managed by the French state, through the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, the Louvre could use some extra revenue to supplement the government subsidies which are its largest source of support. Abu Dhabi is one of the world’s wealthiest cities, but it lacks the art and the connections required to catapult itself to prominence on the global arts scene. Moreover, any project apt to foster conversation and understanding between the Muslim world and the West deserves extra support in the current political climate.

Yet despite the enormous political and economic benefits of this landmark deal, the French arts community has responded with an outcry, embodied in an influential online petition whose 5,000-plus signatories include curators, art historians, and archaeologists. Initiated by art historian and critic Didier Rykner, the petition proclaims that “museums are not for sale.”

Sometimes, pompous rhetoric about art and commerce can conceal a legitimate argument. But not here. The case against the Louvre Abu Dhabi boils down to snobbery and anti-globalization prejudice.

While the French intelligentsia may not admit it, the fact remains: museums are costly enterprises. The Louvre, the most frequently visited museum in the world, requires hundreds of millions of dollars a year to operate. Unlike American cultural institutions, which depend largely on private philanthropy, European museums have traditionally relied on public funding—in part because Europeans are unable to donate pretax dollars, as we can in the U.S., and so have weaker incentives for voluntary giving. With the spiraling costs of security, insurance, restoration, and other expenses, museums like the Louvre will need to find additional funding sources if they are to maintain their preeminence and fulfill their mission of preserving and perpetuating culture.

The arguments against the Louvre Abu Dhabi boil down to snobbery and anti-globalization prejudice.

At the heart of Rykner’s crusade is not money, but fear of global interconnectivity. Tellingly, Rykner’s benchmark of ignominy is New York’s Guggenheim Museum, “the disastrous pioneer of exporting its collections for profit to the whole world.” The Guggenheim is also planning to open a museum in Abu Dhabi in 2011. That branch, along with a Guadalajara release in 2009, will join existing Guggenheim outposts in Bilbao, Berlin, Las Vegas, and Venice. Presumably, Rykner is not a fan of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art either, which has turned its gift shop into a free-floating retail chain with twenty-two U.S. and fifteen foreign locations. But despite disagreement over the integrity of these museums, no one disputes the joy they have spread to millions of visitors worldwide who would never otherwise have been able to view the masterpieces in their collections.

Take, for example, Rykner’s alleged concern with the possibility of damage resulting from the transport of works of art from Paris to the Middle East. Transnational loans have become routine in the art world and the Louvre is clearly capable of managing such transfers. The Louvre already lends some 1,500 works a year to museums around the world—though it does not lend its most precious and fragile works like the Mona Lisa. As the Louvre’s director, Henri Loyrette, has pointed out: “the Louvre was set up during the Revolution and the (Napoleonic) Empire as a universal museum. And all throughout its two-century history, it has always been attached to having partnerships abroad.”

But the controversy is not really over works leaving the Louvre—it is about works going to the Middle East. Last year the Louvre embarked upon a partnership with Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, a three-year deal that raked in $10 million for the French museum. Curiously, that arrangement, which involved loans of 150 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and artifacts (albeit for a shorter term than the Abu Dhabi deal) faced little opposition when first announced. The “city of Coca-Cola,” however, made a convenient appearance in Rykner’s petition against the Abu Dhabi deal.

Rykner goes so far as to claim that the Louvre Abu Dhabi deal is a political stunt to bolster France’s relationship with a key oil trading partner. That claim gains some credibility due to France’s recent struggles with the hijab issue and riots in Muslim suburbs of Paris. On the other hand, Rykner does not complain about Saudi prince Walid bin Talal’s 2005 donation of $20 million to the Louvre for the construction of a wing dedicated to Islamic art. The art to fill that new wing, one imagines, will not be coming from Marseilles.

Although they refuse to share their own cultural heritage, the French elite are perfectly willing to accept foreign money and art in order to bolster domestic cultural institutions.  And even though France may be respected for its tireless dedication to the preservation of fine art, it may also be remembered for acts of hubris and the obstruction of cultural exchange.

Jonathan Bronitsky is a Researcher in Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Art by Darren Wamboldt