Singapore

is curiously, indeed gratifyingly devoid of certain aspects of
creativity. I say gratifyingly because I soon found myself taking a rather
desperate satisfaction in any evidence that such a very tightly-run ship
would lack innovative elan.So, while I had to admit that the trains did indeed run on time, I was
forced to take on some embarrassingly easy targets. Contemporary municipal
sculpture is always fairly easy to make fun of, and this is abundantly
true in Singapore. There was a pronounced tendency toward very large
objects that resembled the sort of thing Mad magazine once drew to make us
giggle at abstract art: ponderous lumps of bronze with equally ponderous
holes through them. Though perhaps, like certain other apparently
pointless features of the cityscape, these really served some arcane but
highly specific geomantic function. Perhaps they were actually conduits
for feng shui, and were only superficially intended
to resemble Henry Moore as reconfigured by a team of Holiday Inn furniture
designers.