The Las Vegas - Dubai Express

David Littlejohn in the Wall Street Journal on CityCenter Las Vegas:

"The second highly-touted good work of CityCenter is its achievement of "LEED Gold" status for six of its buildings, a high mark of distinction for environmental responsibility never before achieved in a project of this scale. ... The center has its own power regeneration plant, energy-saving glass walls, and automatic means of limiting the use of electricity and water. Smoke is pulled upward from the casino floor (all hotels except the Aria are nonsmoking), and slot machine bases house air conditioners. The Aria's fleet of stretch limos to ferry high rollers runs on compressed natural gas."

I'd like to think Littlejohn is choking up on the irony here, but I rather suspect he is simply clueless.

Also clueless: I didn't know that Dubai World is the major outside investor. If you're ever looking for a big-time sucker, go East, man, go Middle East.

Sorry, no pictures -- can't find any that look real.

Modern Potlach: From Axe Heads to Medicine Cabinets

Don't miss this hilarious philistine take on Damien Hirst as a conceptual artist and a bad investment in the ever-earnest New York Times: New Zealand Professor of Art History Denis Dutton weighs in.

Condoms at the Thyssen

For its upcoming Tears of Eros show opening October 20th, El País reports, the Thyssen Museum in Madrid will offer condoms in its gift shop, packaged in some of the show's 120+ artworks of "high erotic content" such as Courbet's The Woman of the Waves, Ribera's San Sebastián or Sam Taylor-Woood's video portrait of a sleeping David Beckham.

With her characteristic false innocence and charm, the Baroness Thyssen, Vice President of the Thyssen Foundation, told El País, "I don't think anyone will be scandalized. ... It seemed like a good idea to me because it means security for the young, more than the day-after pill." Click here for the full story (in Spanish). Photo, Rachel Weisz by James White, one of the works in the show.

NOUVEL TOWER CUT

The New York Planning Commission cuts the Jean Nouvel tower by 200 feet, Nicolai Ourousoff reports.

Paraphrasing Diana Vreeland, in Manhattan a tower can never be too tall or too thin. And you can never have too many of them. As for tops, anything goes, the wackier the better, given the context (wouldn't say the same for Shanghai). Where would the Chrysler have got to if a bunch of middle-aged socialite bureaucrats had to approve it? No one's come up ever with anything wackier, not even Libeskind.