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, ...
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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