Dubai is famously attempting to transform itself into the preeminent Middle Eastern destination city with architecture and art, and Philip Kennicott sees a larger message in all the progress. “Architecturally, despite all the dissonance, the strange juxtapositions of the vulgar and the sleek, the blue-chip buildings next to the shabby high-rise clad in garishly colored glass and surmounted by a pagoda folly, the emirates are essentially an advertisement to an increasingly wowed world: Look at what enlightened, corporate, efficient and non-democratic government can do.”