Now that the cat catches mice...

A new quote for the new China: Xi Jinping, Chinese leader-designate, cited in El País from a speech in Mexico in 2009:

"Some foreigners, with their stomachs full and nothing better to do, dedicate their time to pointing the finger at us. In the first place, China doesn't export revolution. Secondly, it doesn't export hunger and poverty. And thirdly, it doesn't go around looking for trouble. What more is there to say?"

 Translated from the Spanish by JS

Photo from Chinesehour Blog

Xi's wife is a popular singer

Madrid is Bankrupt

Zap is putting the screws on municipalities so they can't keep increasing their debts. He's been especially hard on Madrid (PP), with the biggest debt, and the Mayor was seen literally begging the Pres for a break at the Spain Day parade on October 12th.

He owes trash collection and street cleaning companies over 250 m euros, hasn't paid them in 9 months, and they are threatening to cut services (total debt owed by Spanish municipalities to the big trash haulers (spin-offs of once-rich construction firms) are over 2 bn euros).

The Mayor (Alberto Ruiz Gallardón) owes money to everyone. He put Madrid thru two Olympic bids (2012 and 2016), buried a highway under the Manzanares River, a 10 km underground six-lane salaam course with countless interchanges and extensions, that cost about 6 bn (the best work of interactive installation art I've ever seen, I must admit), built a Dominque Perrault tennis stadium that cost 300 m (double the budget) and that really sucks (The roofs slide up and down but so what? Its a big Kemedy-Center box (Ed Du Stone, Washington DC) finished in galvanized steel and concrete), and uselessly moved city hall into the old post office at Cibeles for a cost of over 100 m, not to mention a lot of other things. When he was Pres of the Madrid regional govt. he sunk another big chunk in a regional subway, underground, that connects all the southern suburbs. A total waste.

It would be great if Madrid forecloses. Its the only thing that might hurt this idiot's popularity -- he is by far the most popular politician in Spain, altho his own party hates him -- they think he's a socialist, because he's not exactly a Francoist. The PP puts up with him because he's unbeatable. And municipal elections are coming up next May -- let's see if he can hold his load until then.

Above, M-30 underground salaam. photo from Wikimedia Commons by FDV; used with permission.

Koons the Collector

Don't miss the New York Times piece on Jeff Koons and his art collection, hidden in his bedroom in his Upper East Side apartment. A portrait, as true as any, of the present moment. History is made by the new rich, and so the most successful striver in American art of my generation, an aw-shucks kid from York, Pennsylvania,  has staked his claim on the Upper East Side -- Park Avenue, surely-- and any Old Masters within reach (he started off on Lichtenstein but now he's on to harder stuff). Does this betray his contemporaneity? Hardly. He just puts himself up there in the best company he can find.

Koons on his own work: "With an ever-present warm smile and the comforting tones of a guidance counselor, he has spoken about how art 'lets you kind of control physiology and the secretions that take place within the body,' how his art operates in 'a morality theater trying to help the underdog,' how his balloon-based sculptures, at least sexually speaking, 'really try to address whatever your interests are.' "

This guy is money in the bank.

Free Association a la FBI

Spain got an official apology from the American Embassy in Madrid after a newspaper revealed that an FBI "most wanted" photo of a digitally-aged Bin Ladin used parts of the face of Gaspar Llamazares, former leader of the Izquierda Unida Party -- a coalition of Communists and left-of-the-Socialists leftists. Some hack at the FBI admitted he had picked Llamazares' face from a campaign poster. Nice to know the FBI is still keeping track of dangerous leftists, and puts the information to good use.

Update 10/20/10:  Not long ago the target of the FBI hunt --not Bin Laden after all, it seems-- was blown to bits by a missile from an unmanned Predator. Don't know if this helps Llamazares sleep better at night or not.

Ever Higher

Did you catch the fireworks show at the inauguration of the Burj Dubai? Pretty close approximation to what a controlled demolition might look like, or a crippling orgasm.

Performance Art by the Hyper-Rich

First I caught up with a "food installation" by Jennifer Rubell, of the real estate family, for New York's Performa, a three-week performance-art festival, reviewed last fall in the Talk of the Town section of an old New Yorker. It featured a dessert course consisting of "three large apple trees, which will be chopped down, brought to the gallery, and laid out on the floor, so that guests can eat fruit from the branches." (October 26, 2009)

Now I find another Talk of the Town piece from the November 30 issue, on a benefit for MOCA in LA featuring Lady Gaga in a Frank Gehry hat, a Steinway decorated with butterflies by Damien Hirst (auctioned and sold to Hirst's dealer, Larry Gagosian, for $450,000), and three heiresses "in matching gold diadems" doing a "visual art act." “We’re a cross between the Spice Girls and Burning Man,” [Margherita] Missoni said, dissolving in giggles." Etc. All presided over by the Russian art promoter and billionaire's daughter Dasha Zhukova.

It's about time real idiots got in on the scene. Maybe now art can move on to something else.

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.