Out of humble origins in a dry region: immense, inconceivable success, first national and then international. A sense that the revenue torrent will never slow, that the capital couldn't even be real. First celebration and then the makeover begins: a project that will break the family structure on the wheel of fantastical development. At enormous cost in cash and misery, the physiognomy is Westernized, whitened: a series of radical modifications that smack of mad egotism and self-loathing at once, leaving a bizarrerie that can be seen from space. The body becomes a surface for the inscription of an architectural fantastic, a horror designed to seduce an imagined audience while demonstrating the pharaonic power to make the unamakeable. Eventually: disgust, boredom, desuetude, collapse. At the 25th anniversary of Thriller, so stand things with Michael Jackson.
But so stand things as well in his adopted exile of Dubai. Or at least they're halfway down the road. Neverland (now under the auctioneer's gavel) might be seen as an intermediate phase between MJ's visage and the "World Islands"/Burj Dubai. The story of Michael Jackson suggests to us that the story of Dubai will end in the not-terribly-distant future as a failed state, descending to darkness and dismay while its architects parade about in quasi-military garb, on to the next last appointment.
Posted by jane at March 8, 2008 07:51 PM | TrackBack