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Exhibition in the Emirates Palace, Abu Dhabi, visited 24th December 2008 – plans for Saadiyat Island.
Currently this is an island containing little to speak of, in a country which half a century ago was very little but desert. If the plans come to fruition, visiting aliens will cast their large eyes around the planet, and naturally home in on this cluster of sci-fi buildings. Its inherent quality is sheer ambition of scale and speed of construction, unhindered by existing context.
Any art commissioned must be international by nature – there’s not a large quantity made locally. It is culture divorced from geography.
While art is often rooted in money, particularly in newspapers, it is at least normally seen as having separate value outside of that money (rightly or wrongly). Such cognitive dissonance may be unnecessary here.
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