Record Prices for Art and Crude Oil

Last year when I went to Beijing to get a taste of its exploding
contemporary art scene, I was especially taken by the monumental and
rather dramatic art installation by Qiu Anxiong in the cavernous space
of the Universal Studios Gallery. In my Art Talk about the Chinese art
scene, I described the dimly lit room dominated by a railroad car – not
a full-scale replica, but the real thing, which I recognized
immediately. I rode similar trains as a child in Soviet Russia in the
50's and 60's. At the gallery, one was invited to climb into this
no-frills railroad car where every window was used as a screen for
projecting black and white documentary footage of 20th century Chinese
history, with special emphasis on the brutality experienced by Chinese
people during WWII and the Cultural Revolution...