Whichever p.r. firm it is that has the Abu Dhabi account in America is truly brilliant... or maybe just very pushy. In any event, someone has gotten the New York Times to run the same story on the top of the front page of its Arts section twice in four days, first on Thursday, then on Sunday. Otherwise, what nonsense has taken control of the editors' minds? OK, it is isn't exactly the same story. But let's read the headlines first. From Thursday: "Celebrity Architects Reveal a Daring Cultural Xanadu for the Arab World." And from Sunday: "A Vision in the Desert. Abu Dhabi has an unlikely proposal for the Middle East. It involves $27 billion, the world's top architects and a brand new city of culture." That last phrase is the conceit of both stories. A new city of culture, to compete with Florence and London, Paris and New York, St. Petersburg and, yes, Cairo or Athens or Barcelona or Shanghai. As if a city of culture can be fashioned pellmell even if, particularly if, the city is without a past and without a curious indigenous population. I can't say I blame the rulers of Abu Dhabi--and, for that matter, the rulers of Dubai--for their ambitions. They have so much money. Why not spend even if it were on a lark? Like the source of the money (Abu Dhabi's is tied to oil; Dubai's to shipping and banking; both of them are lubricated by indentured servitude) their ambitions are quite different. Dubai aspires to expand its commerce and therefore be a center of of activity that does not challenge the body or stretch the mind: Disneyworlds, Disneylands, a completely artificial skiing center, on and on, existing in symbiotic relationship with its hotels, beaches, restaurants, sex clubs, golf clubs, tennis clubs. Dubai has a good chance of success. It does not aspire to change anyone. Just put a bit more superficial excitement into people's lives, the same sort of "oh, my" excitement travelers experience in Anaheim, California or Orlando, Florida, or as the Disney publicity puts it, "where dreams come true." On the other hand, Abu Dhabi--give it its due--wants to do something fresh, maybe even a trifle brave. But I do not think that tourists who want to go to the snazziest new hotel in the Gulf will be at all enticed by a museum hanging one of the thousand of near identical Damien Hirst productions ("Thiosalicyclic Acid Pharmaceutical Painting," glass household paint on canvas, let's say; or 'Isopropamide Iodide," also glass household paint on canvas). Who will go to the opera and what will they want to see? Can you imagine a Wagner festival of Der Ring des Nibelungen, the most intricate musical drama of all time? Or shall we just settle for Aida? What theatrical drama will fill a 6,500 seat theatre? Will Tennessee Williams be allowed, or Jean Anouilh? It's not just that these faux city-states are alienated from the modern and liberated sensibility. They are also ignorant of the classic sensibility. Still, I believe these projects are born of the shame they feel now about being Arab. Shame is sometimes a noble sensibility. After all, Arab civilization is presently descending into the darkness of fanaticism and barbarism. And neither Abu Dhabi nor Dubai are barbaric, and many of their sons and some of their daughters have gone to American colleges and universities. They know what separates culture, even a glitzy culture like ours, from their culture. Can they make bridge the chasm with an expenditure of $27 billion? I doubt it. Of course, shame is often fought by desperation. And these grand plans seem to me to be desperate improvisations. And now back to the New York Times. What has come over it to publish story after story about--in the end--these truly insignificant polities? The populations of both Abu Dhabi and Dubai (1 million and 1.3 million respectively) and count a huge majority of foreigners, really huge. These are not organic societies. They are models for no one. There was a poverty of conception even in the two recent Times articles, and they had abutting them virtually the same photographs and the same maps. As for Xanadu, the "daring cultural Xanadu," Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote these lines,

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree.

But this was a fantasy and, as the poet makes clear, "a savage place." Orson Welles named Citizen Kane's house Xanadu. It was where Kane's life and dreams unraveled and which brought him grief. Maybe someone at the Times actually grasped the futility of the Abu Dhabi enterprise.