This is What Mobocracy Looks Like: Street Artist 'Above' Hangs Banker in Effigy Along Florida's I-95

Taking things too far?

Hardly, this is where things are headed.

At Weasel Zippers, "Effigy of Wall Street Banker Hung From a Noose Over Miami Highway…"

And London's Daily Mail, "Is this taking the protests too far? Occupy Wall Street-inspired artist hangs dummy of banker from telephone wire."

'We are taking steps to permanently armor our major public spaces'

Says Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Hawthorne, who reviews architectural proposals for the National Mall, commissioned by the National Capital Planning Commission, "Critic's Notebook: A design that's bold, restrained and secure."

... it's tough not to feel ambivalent about what the design competition represents in a larger sense for American urbanism as we approach the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. In cities all around the country — not just in New York and Washington — the temporary jersey barriers and other makeshift or ad hoc responses to the threat of terrorism are being replaced by subtler and better-looking but fixed design solutions. The new realities of terror protection are working themselves into the fabric of the American cityscape ...

RTWT.

'The Beatles Illuminated: The Discovered Works of Mike Mitchell' — at Christie's

I saw this on ABC News last night, "Unseen Photos of The Beatles' First US Concert."

And at Christie's: "Sale Information."

And staff members at Christie's share their memories of The Beatles, from surprisingly profound (Kerry Keane) to embarrassingly lame (John Hays). And from Laura Paterson, insightful honesty:

I love the early albums and movies, Hard Day’s Night and Help! This was the Fab Four at their most carefree and surreal (Yellow Submarine notwithstanding). By the time I reached my teens, they simply weren’t cool (Granny liked them, after all), and I switched my allegiance to their rivals, the much edgier seeming Rolling Stones (Granny hated them). Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate their immense influence on popular music and culture. The Beatles define superstardom; from L.A. to Ulaanbaatar, everyone knows who they are.

Photo Essay: The Mike O'Callaghan – Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, at Los Angeles Times

It's from Michael Hiltzik, who I rarely read any more for obvious reasons, but check it out for the photography especially, by James Stillings: "High and Mighty."

Rough Language, Gay Sex Restored to James Jones' From Here to Eternity in New E-Book Edition

No doubt Scott Eric Kaufman will be thrilled.

At Los Angeles Times, "Profanity and more to be found in uncensored 'From Here to Eternity' e-book":

When James Jones published "From Here to Eternity" in 1951, his editors had pulled back some of the frank language and description in his original draft. The resulting novel, which chronicled the drinking, brawling and illicit affairs of soldiers stationed in Hawaii in the months before Pearl Harbor -- was a titillating, critically acclaimed bestseller. The 1953 movie, which starred Frank Sinatra, Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, got a similar reception, winning eight Oscars, including best picture.

Now, a new e-book edition of the novel will include the profanity and mentions of gay sex that were left out of the 1951 version. The uncensored "From Here to Eternity" is being published by Open Road Media and Jones' heirs, including daughter Kaylie Jones.

"It's been on my mind for quite a few years, and the right moment just hadn't come up yet," Kaylie Jones told the New York Times. “My father fought bitterly to hold on to every four-letter word in the manuscript. The publisher was concerned about getting through the censors."

More at the link. James Jones was one of the greatest American novelists, homosexual sex scenes or not.

Black Swan: Dark Side of Perfection

That's the thesis at this review, and at NYT, "On Point, on Top, in Pain."



Saw it earlier this evening. A great thriller, both sensuous and taut. Natalie Portman nails it:

Dancing

Theo loves this:

'Angle of Attack' — From the Steven Givler Collection

From my good friend, Maj. Steven Givler, "New Home for My Paintings."

Lots more fabulous paintings at the link.

And on this holiday weekend I take pride in reposting Steven's e-mail to me from April 4, 2009:

Sir,

Thank you for your blog. I’ve often wondered lately whether my more than 20 years of military service have been devoted to defending a constitution that is no longer recognized by the people who benefit from its protections.

Every once in a while something encourages me to believe that there are still Americans who understand what makes us different from other nations, and who are willing to preserve that difference. Your blog, which I found via RS McCain’s blog, is one of those things.Thanks for the encouragement.

All the best,

Steven

STEVEN A. GIVLER, Maj, USAF
Assistant Air Attache
US EMBASSY Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Steven is now working at a new assignment in Portugal.

Thank you, Steven, for your service.

Blog Headline of the Morning (Regarding Asshole Andres Serrano)

At Althouse, "Andres 'Piss Christ' Serrano as a guest judge on "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist." And click through to the original article. Some of the works include things like men performing sexual self-gratification. And you can see this stuff on TV? Seriously.

But it's Andres Serrano who's of interest to me (why is he considered a worthy judge for Bravo's program, for example?).

Check this interview with Anna Blume from 1993, regarding "Serrano’s recent photographs of [black] dead bodies":

AB Since color is an issue throughout the show, not just aesthetically, but also racially, and racial issues have shown up in your work before, was this in your mind when you edited for the show, thinking about which bodies to photograph?

AS In a manner of speaking. I photographed these people after the moment of death. I never knew them as human beings. I never knew what languages they spoke, what their religious or political beliefs were, how much money they had, or who they loved. All I know about them is the cause of death. And, as they say, you cannot judge a book by its cover. The woman you referred to as not knowing whether she was actually black, is a bleached blonde, brown-skinned woman. She’s a black woman. But she’s been in the morgue for over two months because she’s a Jane Doe, and as a result, she’s starting to decompose and if you look really closely, there are patches of white skin. I asked the doctor and he confirmed that there is white skin under black skin. A teacher of his once took a very thin slice of skin off a cadaver and showed it to his students and said, “This is the thickness of racism.”

And here's this, from an interview with Andres Serrano in 2002:

Being born, especially being born a person of color, is a political act in itself. Everything you do from that point on is political without having to be called political. My work has social implications, it functions in a social arena. In relation to the controversy over Piss Christ, I think the work was politicized by forces outside it, and as a result, some people expect to see something recognizably "political" in my work. I am still trying to do my work as I see fit, which I see as coming from a very personal point of view with broader implications.

Asshole.

UPDATE: Saberpoint provides some artwork, "Stogie Art: Piss Andres (Andres Serrano)."

Five Masterpieces Stolen From Paris Museum of Modern Art

At Washington Post, "In Paris, a $100 Million Heist":

In a brazen display of stealth, cunning and cool nerves, a thief using a sharp cutting tool opened a gated window and sneaked into the Paris Museum of Modern Art.

Three security guards were on duty at the time, but the thief -- or perhaps thieves -- detached five major cubist and post-impressionist paintings from their frames without being detected and slid back into the night with a rolled-up treasure worth well over $100 million.

The embarrassing heist -- of paintings by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani and Fernand Léger -- was discovered just before 7 a.m. Thursday, Paris officials said, probably long after the celebrated canvases had disappeared.

The operation was "a serious loss for the national patrimony" and one of the most damaging art thefts in recent years, said Christophe Girard, a city hall cultural attache.

"I am saddened and shocked by this theft, which is an intolerable attack on the universal cultural heritage of Paris," Mayor Bertrand Delanoe said in a statement. The museum was closed temporarily, he said, to allow police to investigate unhindered by art lovers.

Officers descended on the museum, in the tony 16th Arrondissement, just across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower, seeking to determine how anyone could have entered the museum without setting off an elaborate security system. Wearing rubber gloves and surgical masks, the officers powdered the gilded frames in an effort to gather fingerprints, and they examined the pried-open gate and the fractured glass window to see how it was isolated from the alarm system.

But the mystery remained, particularly concerning what the security guards were doing while the paintings were being stripped from their frames and hauled away. Responding to news reports, Delanoe said the alarm system had been malfunctioning since late March.

Smart theives with good taste --- now that's a thought!

Photos at the link.

SHOWN ABOVE: Pablo Picasso, The Pigeon with Green Peas (1911).

Jasper Johns 'Flag' Encaustic Goes for $28.6 Million at Auction

Well some lucky rich fellow's got taste.

At NYT, "Seminal Jasper Johns Painting Draws $28.6 Million Bid":

One of Jasper Johns’s seminal Flag paintings, from 1960-1966, that had belonged to Michael Crichton, the best-selling writer, became the star of Christie’s post-war and contemporary art auction on Tuesday night when it brought $28.6 million ....

The buyer was Richard Rossello, a dealer in American paintings based in Bryn Mawr, Pa., who could be seen with a cell phone glued to his ear during the bidding.

The Johns flag, in encaustic, an ancient technique in which pigment is suspended in wax, giving each brush stroke a distinct materiality, is a hot commodity in auction circles because few ever come for sale. And on Tuesday night five other bidders tried to buy the painting, which had been officially estimated to bring $10 million to $15 million.

RTWT.

Image Credit: Wikipedia, "Flag, Encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood,1954-55."

My Son's Slavery History Project

My son's drawing for his 8th grade slavery history project:

'American Stories' @ American Power

I took the afternoon off from blogging on Friday to visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Reviews are at LAT: "Art Review: 'American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915' ...," and "Art Review: 'Renoir in the 20th Century' ..."

LACMA's on Wilshire in L.A.'s Miracle Mile district. I just love it there. As I'm walking into the museum, a look at the main entrance:

As shown, there are actually two exhibits running simultaneously. I'm way more interested in American art, so I visited "American Stories" first. I last visited LACMA in 2006, when the sensational Gustav Klimpt exhibit was running (and generating all kinds of speculation about the future of the museum). A lot has changed, including a complete redesign of the entire facility. Here I'm walking into the "American Stories" exhibit:

No pictures allowed inside the exhibits, but I snapped one more as I'm entering:

My favorite piece of art, Winslow Homer's "The Cotton Pickers, 1876," is on permanent collection at LACMA. The curators moved the piece to a central vantage point for the "American Stories" collection. (I was pleased by that. I bought a "Cotton Pickers" poster in 2006 and I just had it framed last week. I'm mounting it in my office at work, and will update on that when I get it done.) I took notes of the paintings for reference, 35 detailed scribblings in all, so I can post on them later. A lot of photographs of these are in the public domain, so posting is hassle-free. Below, I'm leaving the old side of the museum (the Ahmanson building, etc.), crossing the courtyard where a booth, out of view at left, is set up for ticket sales ($25 to see both exhibits, which was exhorbitant, IMHO). I'm facing Wilshire Boulevard:

The new Eli Broad Museum:

An escalator takes you up to the third floor:

Looking back east, you can see LACMA's older buildings:

Walking into the museum:

Again, no photography permitted, but if you look at the screencap above you can see a glimpse of the exhibit, from the entry on the second floor. Notice the lightness in the white-painted walls, which is a bright contrast to the darker feeling at the "American Stories" exhibit. The curators obviously wanted a smashing show, the least of which to justify the huge ticket prices. I eschewed notetaking this time, mostly from fatigue, but also so as to reflect and wonder more at the paintings. An awesome learning experience, LACMA had short film clips of Auguste Renoir running in a theater alcove. Some of the works on display can be seen at this video:

Walking back outside now, down the stairs. Kind of postmod feel to the place, while retaining the steel-girders of the industrial age. Striking contrasts:

The view facing east on Wilshire. I'm walking back to my car:

Driving east now, to get a bite to eat, here's the Wiltern Theater (at the intersection of Wilshire and Western). The Psychedelic Furs are playing in June, plus Jakob Dylan next month:

Cutting north when I get to Figueroa, then east again on Cesar Chavez, I make my way through Chinatown over to Philippe's, a Los Angeles institution since before the Great Depression. My dad used to take me to eat here when I was a small child. I never forget:

As usual, I had the beef dip sandwich -- but thinking about it now, I should've also ordered potato salad or cole slaw. Maybe next time (and notice that I just started reading Jason Mattera's, "Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation"):

A cup of coffee's still just nine cents:

Customers ordering:

I love the ambience. Takes you back to another time. This photo says "Phillipe's as it appeared about 1935 -- sandwiches were ten cents":

My favorite. Kinda hard to read but the caption says "a locomotive dropped in for a sandwich in 1948":

Going home now, past Union Station. I love L.A.:

G-Spot Mouse

I'm sure Ann Althouse could work up a pithy entry on this, and don't even get Robert Stacy McCain going!

More pics here.

Hat Tip: Vanderleun.

'Alice in Wonderland'

I took my boys to see "Alice in Wonderland" yesterday. Kenneth Turan's review is here. We liked it. It's the first major studio production I've seen in 3D, and it worked for me, although I had strong reminiscences of Captain EO from the 1980s. So, not sure how far the technology's actually advanced. Still, the format is perfectly a piece with Tim Burton's oeuvre. Perhaps the acting was flat, and frankly, Elijah Wood could have played "Mat Hatter" without all the makeup. But it was enjoyable for me (anything with "good versus evil" catches my attention). Besides, my youngest boy started bugging me on Friday as soon as I picked him up from school. He loves the movies -- seriously, monumentally loves them -- and seeing it through the eyes of your children is worth more than all the theater art-critic reviews in the world. That said, check NYT, "What’s a Nice Girl Doing in This Hole?", WSJ, "'Alice': Half a Wonderland."

'American Stories' at LACMA

I don't care for the cultural context of Christopher Knight's review (I don't make his connections), although the show is a smash. See, "Art review: 'American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915' at LACMA":

What is an American? Today, as the 20th century -- the so-called "American Century" -- recedes in memory, the question can seem immodest or even grandiose. If we don't know now, after decades wielding almost unimaginable superpower status around the globe, will we ever?

Still, there's another way to look at it. The question arises anew because of the conflicted place in which the United States finds itself today.

With the national nervous breakdown unleashed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks -- trauma Americans have collectively been unable to resolve -- our identity remains a shambles. The uncertainty had been building for at least 30 years. In the aftermath of Abu Ghraib and AIG, once-settled matters of morality now appear unrecognizable.

A new exhibition of American paintings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art seems prompted by this deep unease. The show turns to history -- to the era when the question of what an American might be was still brand new and very much up for grabs.

"American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915" centers on 19th century art. Lots of first-rate paintings keep company with dreadful Victorian morality plays. George Bellows, Mary Cassatt, John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Charles Willson Peale and Rembrandt Peale (father and son) and others stand out.

Mostly it regards the evolution of genre paintings, which show men and women at work and leisure, engaged in public and private life. A few portraits also make an appearance. They include Copley's classic 1768 depiction of Paul Revere, silversmith and Revolutionary War hero, in shirtsleeves. His chin is contemplatively held in his right hand, a handsomely crafted silver teapot cradled in his left.

The teapot of course nods toward the critical role of tea in the New World's economy. A year before, Britain's Parliament fiddled with the tea tax; results were devastating for colonists. (Witness Revere's grim, shadowed face.) The subsequent Boston Tea Party was an insurrection against a corporate stranglehold on trade, held by the British East India Company working with George III. Copley's brilliant image fuses head and hand as tools for thought, labor and moral action. The portrait describes a person, but it places him in the context of an epic story.

The painting -- as sleek and elegantly crafted as Revere's light-reflective silver -- puts artists in that developing story too. Copley is as much an agent of thought, labor and action as Revere is, and his work speaks to the present as much as to history.

The painting occupies pride of place as the first picture encountered in the show. Across from it is Copley's monumental -- and morally ambiguous -- "Watson and the Shark," showing a notorious British businessman who, in his youth, fell overboard from a merchant marine ship and was nearly eaten by an enormous shark. With the theatrical flourish of Grand Manner style, Copley painted this thrashing melodrama of heroic rescue in London.

I recently posted "Watson and the Shark." See, "American Stories."

The show runs through May, so look forward to my own mini-review here sometime in the next few weeks. See, LACMA, "American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915.

IMAGE CREDIT: "Portrait of Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley, c.1768–70," via Wikimedia Commons.

The Complexity of American Power

As long-time readers know, I'm highly critical of the neo-declinist school in international political economy. We've seen a big revival of theories on America's imminent decline as the dominant world power, and my sense is that few of these arguments are theoretically innovative or empirically convincing (see, for example, Christopher Layne, "The Unipolar Illusion Revisited: The Coming End of the United States' Unipolar Moment").

That said, I think Harvard's Niall Ferguson is doing some of the most compelling writing on this. I was critical earlier of Ferguson's piece at Newsweek, "An Empire at Risk." The budget projections he cites there are simply frightening, but his arguments imply way too much inevitability and evade historical contingency.

That said, I'm loving his new essay at Foreign Affairs, "Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos." Ferguson introduces his piece with a fascinating discussion of artist Thomas Cole of the Hudson River School (epic 19th century landscape painting). Ferguson cites Cole's five-piece visionary ensemble, "The Course of Empire." Here's the introduction:

There is no better illustration of the life cycle of a great power than The Course of Empire, a series of five paintings by Thomas Cole that hang in the New-York Historical Society. Cole was a founder of the Hudson River School and one of the pioneers of nineteenth-century American landscape painting; in The Course of Empire, he beautifully captured a theory of imperial rise and fall to which most people remain in thrall to this day.

Each of the five imagined scenes depicts the mouth of a great river beneath a rocky outcrop. In the first, The Savage State, a lush wilderness is populated by a handful of hunter-gatherers eking out a primitive existence at the break of a stormy dawn. The second picture, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, is of an agrarian idyll: the inhabitants have cleared the trees, planted fields, and built an elegant Greek temple. The third and largest of the paintings is The Consummation of Empire. Now, the landscape is covered by a magnificent marble entrepôt, and the contented farmer-philosophers of the previous tableau have been replaced by a throng of opulently clad merchants, proconsuls, and citizen-consumers. It is midday in the life cycle. Then comes Destruction. The city is ablaze, its citizens fleeing an invading horde that rapes and pillages beneath a brooding evening sky. Finally, the moon rises over the fifth painting, Desolation. There is not a living soul to be seen, only a few decaying columns and colonnades overgrown by briars and ivy.

Pictured here is the fourth masterpiece, "Destruction," available from Wikimedia Commons.

Readers can assess Ferguson's argument in full. I like this passage of the fall on the Roman Empire:

Perhaps the most famous story of imperial decline is that of ancient Rome. In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, Edward Gibbon covered more than 1,400 years of history, from 180 to 1590. This was history over the very long run, in which the causes of decline ranged from the personality disorders of individual emperors to the power of the Praetorian Guard and the rise of monotheism. After the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180, civil war became a recurring problem, as aspiring emperors competed for the spoils of supreme power. By the fourth century, barbarian invasions or migrations were well under way and only intensified as the Huns moved west. Meanwhile, the challenge posed by Sassanid Persia to the Eastern Roman Empire was steadily growing.

But what if fourth-century Rome was simply functioning normally as a complex adaptive system, with political strife, barbarian migration, and imperial rivalry all just integral features of late antiquity? Through this lens, Rome's fall was sudden and dramatic -- just as one would expect when such a system goes critical. As the Oxford historians Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins have argued, the final breakdown in the Western Roman Empire began in 406, when Germanic invaders poured across the Rhine into Gaul and then Italy. Rome itself was sacked by the Goths in 410. Co-opted by an enfeebled emperor, the Goths then fought the Vandals for control of Spain, but this merely shifted the problem south. Between 429 and 439, Genseric led the Vandals to victory after victory in North Africa, culminating in the fall of Carthage. Rome lost its southern Mediterranean breadbasket and, along with it, a huge source of tax revenue. Roman soldiers were just barely able to defeat Attila's Huns as they swept west from the Balkans. By 452, the Western Roman Empire had lost all of Britain, most of Spain, the richest provinces of North Africa, and southwestern and southeastern Gaul. Not much was left besides Italy. Basiliscus, brother-in-law of Emperor Leo I, tried and failed to recapture Carthage in 468. Byzantium lived on, but the Western Roman Empire was dead. By 476, Rome was the fiefdom of Odoacer, king of the Goths.

What is most striking about this history is the speed of the Roman Empire's collapse. In just five decades, the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late fifth century -- inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle -- shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in the rest of western Europe. What Ward-Perkins calls "the end of civilization" came within the span of a single generation.

More at the link, if you'd like to continue reading. (The essay includes images of all five of Cole's paintings from "The Course of Empire" series.)

Ferguson's theoretical contribution here is to draw on "systems theories" that explain processes of change across a range of human activities, including world politics. While fascinating, Ferguson focuses on complex change across the international system as as whole. His main point, as you can tell from the discussion of Rome, is that America's hegemonic collapse could come suddenly. And of course, that's a perfectly reasonable argument, and quite interesting in the context of the interdisciplinary research. The problem for me is that all theories of American decline are at base economic. And if we apply a complex systems analysis to the U.S. economy we'd find that complexity is the nature of the game, and that innovation and chaos may well create another massive boom cycle at any time. I touched on these issues previously in my essay, "The Next Industrial Revolution."

This is not to say I'm not worried about America's problems and the potential collapse of American power. I simply think history is more complicated -- and the American economy more dynamic -- than declinists allow.

In any cases, readers might like Peter Liberman's reading list at Foreign Affairs, "What to Read on American Primacy." Also, I'd suggest Fareed Zakaria's work is a bit more pragmatic than Niall Ferguson's. See, "The Future of American Power: How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest."

Burj Dubai Renamed After UAE President

Okay, here's another posts while waiting for my uploads - plus my wife needs THIS laptop!

The main story's at the Washington Post, "Dubai opens half-mile-high tower, world's tallest." And it turns out the building's been renamed. From the Wall Street Journal, "Burj Dubai To Be Called Burj Khalifa Bin Zayed After UAE Pres." But I actually wanted to share a cool architecture review from the Los Angeles Times, by Christopher Hawthorne, " The Burj Dubai and architecture's vacant stare":

One of the odder, more complicated moments in the history of architectural symbolism will arrive Monday with the formal opening of the Burj Dubai skyscraper. At about 2,600 feet high -- the official figure is still being kept secret by developer Emaar Properties -- and 160 stories, the tower, set back half a mile or so from Dubai's busy Sheikh Zayed Road, will officially take its place as the tallest building in the world.

Designed by Adrian Smith, a former partner in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the Burj Dubai is an impossible-to-miss sign of the degree to which architectural ambition -- at least the kind that can be measured in feet or number of stories -- has migrated in recent years from North America and Europe to Asia and the Middle East. It is roughly as tall as the World Trade Center towers piled one atop the other. Its closest competition is Toronto's CN Tower, which is not really a building at all, holding only satellites and observation decks, and is in any case nearly 900 feet shorter.

Monday's ribbon-cutting, though, could hardly come at a more awkward time. Dubai, the most populous member of the United Arab Emirates, continues to deal with a massive real estate collapse that has sent shock waves through financial markets around the world and forced the ambitious city-state, in a significant blow to its pride, to seek repeated billion-dollar bailouts from neighboring Abu Dhabi. Conceived at the height of local optimism about Dubai's place in the region and the world, this seemingly endless bean-stock tower, which holds an Armani Hotel on its lower floors with apartments and offices above, has flooded Dubai with a good deal more residential and commercial space than the market can possibly bear.

And so here is the Burj Dubai's real symbolic importance: It is mostly empty, and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Though most of its 900 apartments have been sold, virtually all were bought three years ago -- near the top of the market -- and primarily as investments, not as places to live. ("A lot of those purchases were speculative," Smith, in something of an understatement, told me in a phone interview.) And there's virtually no demand in Dubai at the moment for office space. The Burj Dubai has 37 floors of office space.

Though Emaar is understandably reluctant to disclose how much of the tower is or will be occupied -- it did not reply to e-mails sent this week on that score -- it's fair to assume that like many of Dubai's new skyscrapers it is a long, long way from being full. In that sense the building is a powerful iconic presence in ways that have little directly to do with its record-breaking height. To a remarkable degree, the metaphors and symbols of the built environment have been dominated in recent months by images of unneeded, sealed-off, ruined, forlorn or forsaken buildings and cityscapes. The Burj Dubai is just the latest -- and biggest -- in this string of monuments to architectural vacancy.

The combination of overbuilding during the boom years, thanks to easy credit, and the sudden paralysis of the financial markets in the fall of 2008 has created an unprecedented supply of unwanted or under-occupied real estate around the world. At the same time, rising cultural worry about environmental disaster or some other end-of-days scenario has produced a recent stream of books, movies and photography imagining cities and pieces of architecture emptied of nearly all signs of human presence.

More at the link.

See also, "The Burj Khalifa and regime insecurity."

Penélope Cruz in 'Broken Embraces'

I'm heading out of here to see Penélope Cruz in "Broken Embraces," a Spanish fim by directer Pedro Almodóvar. I used to attend French films all the time, before I was married. It's good to get away from American cinema from time to time. My interest today, however, is not so much international art, but Ms. Cruz herself. I love her! I'll post a review tonight. Here's the trailer, with subtitles:

Nude Brooke Shields Exhibit Prompts Backlash

A photo exhibit featuring images of a young Brooke Shields nude has sparked a cultural and political backlash. Lots of stories in the news. See, "Exhibit Featuring Nude Photo of 10-year-Old Brooke Shields Sparks Outrage." (Via Memeorandum.)

Plus, the Daily Mail, "Tate Removes Nude Picture of 10-Year-Old Brooke Shields After Police Pornography Probe." And from London's Telegraph, "Tate Modern's Brooke Shields Photograph: A Crass Lack of Morals in Mink-Coated Reagan Years":

Whenever the Metropolitan Police force is called to an art gallery to defend our morals, you can be sure that the work they don't want the public to see will be one of the most important in the show.

Tate Modern's Pop Life is a fascinating show, but one of the most interesting works in it is the American artist Richard Prince's 1983 work Spiritual America.

It takes the form of a ready-made or found object – a publicity photograph showing the prepubescent actress Brooke Shields naked, her body wet from the bath. What's more, her hair has been elaborately done and she is wearing so much lipstick, mascara and eye shadow that it looks as though the head of a 25-year-old Playmate had been spliced on the body of a child. The original photo was commissioned with the approval of the child's mother who, as her manager, allowed it to be published in the soft porn magazine Sugar n' Spice as a tactic to get her daughter noticed and so further her career.

The Telegraph features a partial shot of controversial image. The full photograph is here, The Saatchi Gallery: London Contemporary Art Gallery.

Above Image Credit: Denver Post.