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The five pieces include a series of tall metal containers filled with coal arranged in a maze that leads to a pile of coal in the centre – the work of Greek artist Janis Kounellis called “Untitled”.

Also on show are a bronze and wooden leg and foot by German artist George Baselitz and a figure of a naked man carved into a horizontal slab of marble by Italian Luciano Fabro.

The other exhibits include a video and photographic display by American minimalist Robert Morris and photographs of crowds by German Thomas Struth.

The director of the Accademia, Franca Falleti, who organised the exhibition, was suitably dismissive of the critics:

“We have had lots of negative comments from visitors, which has surprised me, but then again it’s always easy to complain,” she said.

“I expected there to be some criticism because a lot of people today just have no appreciation of contemporary art.

“People look at David as a religious-like figure through blinkered eyes, so when that is contrasted with contemporary art it is too much for them.”

lready described what is taking place as genocide, but the Sudanese government yesterday said the UN report, to be published later this week, would not endorse that conclusion.

“We have a copy of that report and they didn’t say there is a genocide,” Mustafa Osman Ismail, the Sudanese foreign minister said in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, yesterday.

Such suggestions have dismayed Glenys Kinnock, a Labour MEP and overseas development spokeswoman, Michael Ancram, the deputy Tory leader, and Sir Menzies Campbell, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats.

In a joint letter to Mr Blair, they wrote: “We fear the UN commission on Darfur will, in effect, signal to the military dictatorship in Khartoum that it can continue to murder its own citizens with impunity.”

Glad to see Menzies Campbell coming round to the idea of getting tough with dictatorships that murder their own citizens.

Last summer, Mr Blair said he believed Britain was doing everything possible for Darfur, and he visited Khartoum in October, where he said he had received assurances from the regime that the violence would be curbed. Those promises have been broken, according to Mrs Kinnock, Mr Ancram and Sir Menzies.

In New York yesterday, Australia, Canada and New Zealand urged the UN Security Council to impose targeted sanctions on Sudan’s regime and prosecute its members for war crimes.

Britain should surely be joining in here. Blair’s Khartoum visit did seem a miscalculation, serving only to make him look naive.

Christopher Hitchens takes a deep breath and explains why Iraq is not Vietnam (via AL Daily):

There it was again, across half a page of the New York Times last Saturday, just as Iraqis and Kurds were nerving themselves to vote. “Flashback to the 60’s: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam.” The basis for the story, which featured a number of experts as lugubrious as they were imprecise, was the suggestion that South Vietnam had held an election in September 1967, and that this propaganda event had not staved off ultimate disaster.

I can’t quite tell why this article was not printed on the day before the Afghan or Palestinian elections, or at any of the times when Iranian voters overwhelmingly chose reform candidates but were thwarted by the entrenched reserve strength of the theocracy. But perhaps now is the moment to state the critical reasons why there is no reasonable parallel of any sort between Iraq and Vietnam.

Which he then proceeds to do.

newspaper, far-sighted liberals such as David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen and Christopher Hitchens. Oh, and George W. Bush. We have not been without our critics. I’ve listed a few, just a very few, of their names above.

For the past few months, whenever discussion has turned to the wisdom of the Iraq war, or the prospects for Iraq’s future, in our newspapers and on our airwaves, the critics’ voices have been dominant. And their opposition to what has been happening doom-laden.

But there are other voices who were not heard, indeed had not been heard for many years. On Sunday they spoke at last. The people of Iraq told Robin, Menzies, Douglas and George something I had been longing to hear. Their message was simple.

When you tell us that it was wrong to get rid of Saddam, foolish to press ahead with an election, naive to believe in Arab democracy, you exercise a valuable, cherishable freedom. But not in our name.

m Jong Nam, and his even bigger arsenal.

Kristof believes this largely because he wants to believe it. He thinks the survival of the Kim dynasty would prove hugely embarrassing to Bush, who, he believes, has badly mishandled dealings with North Korea. No suggestions as to what a better approach might involve, but it’s obvious Bush has mishandled things because….well, because he’s Bush.

He invaded Iraq because it might some day develop nuclear weapons, even as North Korea was openly and vociferously going all out to expand a known arsenal of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. So the administration has tended to avoid talking about North Korea.

In contrast, this article in the Sunday Times paints a convincing picture of a regime on its last legs:

Far across the frozen river two figures hurried from the North Korean shore, slip-sliding on the ice as they made a break for the Chinese riverbank to escape a regime that, by many accounts, is now entering its death throes. It was a desperate risk to run in the stark glare of the winter sunshine. We had just seen a patrol of Chinese soldiers in fur-lined uniforms tramping along the snowy bank, their automatic rifles slung ready for action.

Police cars swept up and down the road every 10 or 15 minutes, on the look-out for refugees. A small group of Chinese travellers in our minibus, some of whom turned out to have good reasons to be discreet, pretended not to notice.

The two made it to shelter and we ploughed on towards a border post that offered us a rare opportunity to cross into the northeastern corner of the last Stalinist state, posing as would-be investors in an experimental free trade zone.

We had already witnessed one sign that North Korea’s totalitarian system is dissolving, even as its leaders boast of owning nuclear weapons to deter their enemies.

“It’s just like the Berlin Wall,” Pastor Douglas Shin, a Christian activist, said by telephone from Seoul. “The slow-motion exodus is the beginning of the end.”

In interviews for this article over many months, western policymakers, Chinese experts, North Korean exiles and human rights activists built up a picture of a tightly knit clan leadership in Pyongyang that is on the verge of collapse.

Some of those interviewed believe the “Dear Leader”, Kim Jong-il, has already lost his personal authority to a clique of generals and party cadres. Without any public announcement, governments from Tokyo to Washington are preparing for a change of regime.

The death of Kim’s favourite mistress last summer, a security clampdown on foreign aid workers and a reported assassination attempt in Austria last November against the leader’s eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, have all heightened the sense of disintegration.

If the regime were to collapse, it might suggest – horrors! – that the Bush approach was not so foolish after all.

Michael Ignatieff in the Observer:

The election in Iraq is without precedent. Never, not even in the dying days of Weimar Germany, when Nazis and Communists brawled in the streets, has there been such a concerted attempt to destroy an election through violence – with candidates unable to appear in public, election workers driven into hiding, foreign monitors forced to ‘observe’ from a nearby country, actual voting a gamble with death, and the only people voting safely the fortunate expatriates and exiles abroad.
Just as depressing as the violence in Iraq is the indifference to it abroad. Americans and Europeans who have never lifted a finger to defend their own right to vote seem not to care that Iraqis are dying for the right to choose their own leaders.

Why do so few people feel even a tremor of indignation when they see poll workers gunned down? Why isn’t there a trickle of applause in the press for the more than 6,000 Iraqis actually standing for political office at the risk of their lives?

Explaining this morose silence requires understanding how support for Iraqi democracy has become the casualty of the corrosive bitterness that still surrounds the initial decision to go to war. Establishing free institutions in Iraq was the best reason to support the war – now it is the only reason – and for that very reason democracy there has ceased to be a respectable cause.

Gerard Baker in the Times has some fun with the Larry Summers controversy:

You might think a distinguished and senior professor at one of America’s most renowned universities had seen it all by now. After a few decades of teaching and writing, a top academic such as Nancy Hopkins, professor of biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one might assume, would have developed a sturdy carapace of scholastic experience that would shield her from nasty side-effects of shocking solecisms by peers or students.

But this month at an academic conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Professor Hopkins observed something so unspeakable that, as she subsequently told reporters, it almost caused her to faint. “I just couldn’t breathe,” she said. If she had stayed in the room, she went on, she would have either “blacked out or thrown up”.

What could have caused Professor Hopkins’s oesophagic crisis? Some grisly slide-show depicting the results of a hideous crime, perhaps? An outburst of obscenities from the podium? Something noxious dropped stealthily into her coffee during the mid-morning break? (You know how bitter these intra-academic rivalries can be.)

No. The answer was the spectacle of a fellow academic, a rather grand one, indulging in one of the most heinous transgressions known to humankind — daring to challenge that precious hegemonic orthodoxy of American academia, the impossibility of gender inequality.

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t to reply to UN questions about the reported bombings.

Kofi Annan is, apparently, “deeply disturbed”. He “urged both the Sudanese government and rebel movements in Darfur to comply fully with their commitments under the ceasefire agreement they struck in April last year.”

n issue which has become discredited in the eyes of world public opinion by using the press, radio, television, the Internet, and, most importantly of all, cinema and the great filmmaking industry in Hollywood, since most of the significant players of this influential industry are Jews. […]

The victims were from different nations and ethnic groups, including the Jews, who also lost many people, but the Jews were not the only victims of the war and a greater number of innocent people from other ethnic groups also lost their lives.

The issue of the Holocaust and the anniversaries held for the event are only meant to promote the repressive policies of the Zionists.

The Jews suffered as a result of Hitler’s expansionism, just like other innocent victims but should not be granted special privileges over the others.

The declaration that six million Jews were killed in World War II is an exaggeration of the truth. Furthermore, the suffering and pains of a nation cannot justify their crimes against other nations.

The issue of the Holocaust is only being highlighted to cover up Israel’s crimes in Palestine.