Dubai’s cultural waste land

When the bubble burst last year in Dubai, an endlessly reported detail was the number of cars abandoned — some supposedly with apology notes stuck to the windshields — by debt-burdened foreigners fleeing an economy in free fall. Now the German impresario hired to oversee the emirate’s ambitious cultural plans has also quit his post, ...

KARIM SAHIB/AFP/Getty Images
KARIM SAHIB/AFP/Getty Images
KARIM SAHIB/AFP/Getty Images

When the bubble burst last year in Dubai, an endlessly reported detail was the number of cars abandoned — some supposedly with apology notes stuck to the windshields — by debt-burdened foreigners fleeing an economy in free fall. Now the German impresario hired to oversee the emirate’s ambitious cultural plans has also quit his post, leaving behind not a missive on the Volkswagen Touareg SUV he drove in the desert boomtown, but Dubai Speed, a unique insider’s memoir of the grandiose — and all too fleeting — attempt to use state power to reinvent a culture.

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<p> Michael Z. Wise has covered Central Europe for Reuters and the Washington Post. </p>

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