The museum is technically in the city, though not in a way that feels organic. It stands on a large outcropping named — probably by the powerful, government-run Abu Dhabi Tourism and Cultural Authority, or its development arm — Saadiyat Island, or “Island of Happiness.” Connected by a bridge to the mainland, this site will eventually be a “cultural district,” bristling with hotels, condos, malls and other museums, including an Abu Dhabi Guggenheim. Paid for with hydrocarbon cash and built largely by South Asian laborers, Saadiyat has been fabricated primarily as a destination for a global leisured class.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi is a fabrication, too. It isn’t an official Louvre franchise. For the equivalent of $1.15 billion, the museum has temporarily leased the Louvre brand. It can use the illustrious name for 30 years and borrow works from the Louvre and a dozen other French state institutions (the Musée d’Orsay, the Centre Pompidou, the Bibliothèque Nationale, etc.) for a decade. This will give the new museum time to assemble a permanent collection — the acquisition process is well underway — and create its own version of a global art history.

And what does that history, currently fleshed out with loans, look like? Item by item, pretty sensational. And how does it read as a narrative? The narrative is engagingly well paced, but — and this is true of every encyclopedic museum I’m familiar with — sugarcoated and incomplete.