Arts Melting Air
This is the Burj al Arab.
It is the tallest hotel in the world, built on an artificial island, and is in the city that marks the terminal point of the Arab world, the point at which it becomes one with capitalism, Dubai. Bin Laden doesn’t stand a chance. Dubai is the future that no power, no religion, no amount of terror can deny.
The hotel celebrates the birthplace of modern capitalism—the seas (“Just as the earth, the firm and solid ground, is a precondition of the principle of family [village] life, so is the sea the natural element for the industry”). It takes its shape from a sail that’s full of air and rushing a ship’s cargo of commodities to its buyers, its destiny.
Drawing from this famous line: “[The slave] has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord… . [this] absolute melting away of everything stable,” Marx and Engles produced this famous line: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air…” What capital ultimately wants is total detachment from reality and history.
The hotel references two of capital’s primary aspirations: one, in shape it references movement, circulation, locomotion (in the original Greek sense of that word—location movement); two, the fact that it is built on an artificial island references capital’s emphasis on exchange value, its detach from the real, its melting into air.
It's Burj, not Bruj, al Arab. Dubai is an amazing place, as long as you're not Jewish.