Well, if we are really globalizing, can't monuments move across continents too? Once upon a time, monuments were thought to be the very embodiment of a spirit in place, crystallizing shared memory and community-created meaning in a landscape or cityscape. But in today's world, we can't imagine communities that can fit any monuments (or is it that we just lack the ability to dream up monuments to fit the non-communities we imagine?). So we are left with the next logical step - put those monuments in a container and ship them around the world. At least we can celebrate the fact that some of our monuments work just great as marketing icons, as the city's equivalent of the Nike swoop.

Architects working on the Danish pavilion in Shanghai's Expo 2010 have proposed to move the Little Mermaid to China. Hate to say it, but it seems a bit derivative of Lim Tzay Chuen's proposal to move the Merlion to Venice for the Venice Biennale 2005. However the public debate around this (see the Art Newspaper article) seems a heck of a lot more enjoyable and juicy than the Singapore equivalent: "We asked Cabinet to approve and they said no".

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