Word: luxembourger
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Luxembourg's Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean has almost everything a modern art museum could want: a prime location overlooking the nation's capital, a dramatic new building designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei and an expected deluge of art-hungry visitors. Luxembourg is one of this year's European Capitals of Culture, and a new TGV fast-train line from France opens in June...
...however, Mudam may have a winner, a show that does justice to its elegant new quarters and tickles the imagination as well. The exhibition, open until May 7, features that rarest of commodities, a Luxembourg-born artist: Michel Majerus, who in an intense, tragically shortened career fused Pop, Minimalism and other genres with a punk sense of fun. Majerus was more a painter than a video or installation artist, so most of the 250 works in the show are canvases - big ones, some the size of billboards, all throbbing with color, text and images purloined from comic books and advertising...
...That could almost describe the museum. Mudam has been in the works for nearly two decades, slowed by squabbling among city fathers over its site, design, materials and even whether Luxembourg - a hardheaded realm of financiers and Eurocrats - needed such an extravagance. Jacques Santer, the country's former Prime Minister and a European Commission President, helped convince them to seek repute as a cultural capital instead of a mere tax haven...
...tried to outlaw the habit with its Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, which makes it unlawful for any American firm to make a corrupt payment to a foreign official. But that was long the exception; many other rich countries simply turned a blind eye. In Germany and Luxembourg , bribes used to be tax deductible. In many countries, and for many firms, bribes were just the way things were done...
...timing was brilliant: worldwide demand for steel has been soaring because of massive demand from China and other fast-growing economies, and with it so has Mittal's net worth. By 2005, his personal fortune was estimated to be $25 billion - more than twice the size of Luxembourg's annual budget. Before the takeover, Mittal Steel was based in the Netherlands (as a result of the merger, the headquarters is moving to Luxembourg), and quoted on the London Stock Exchange. Mittal lives in London, in a 12-bedroom mansion in Kensington Palace Gardens for which he paid a cool...