Sadly, ginormous cruise ships were not wiped out by the pandemic. They’re back, bigger than ever. Despite a lot of greenwashing, they are of course still environmentally disastrous and wasteful – and they dominate harbor fronts the world over, rocking the foundations of ancient cities like Venice, discharging waste, polluting air and water.
In Sydney, the pollution is also very, very visual. Over the course of my two weeks in Sydney, I saw so many of these giant sea skyscrapers coming and going – and the biggest ones typically anchored right across from the Opera house. Check out this short ten-second video I took to give you an idea of the scale.
I may expand this entry at some other time, but for now it will remain mostly a ‘visual rant’…
Sydney clearly eagerly awaited the return of these massive ships to its harbor after the pandemic. Check out this article which celebrates the arrival of the first international passenger ship in the fall of 2022. The image that accompanied the article shows how the huge Opera house is completely dwarfed by the 3,000 passenger ship Carnival Splendor.
Rather fittingly, we went to see the Banksy exhibit at Sydney Town Hall during my last weekend and among a lot of other powerful pieces, it included his brilliant “Venice in Oil” piece. This was his uninvited contribution to the 2019 Biennale and it’s probably the best and most succinct artistic commentary on the subject. It’s an assemblage of oil paintings of, well, a modern Venitian landscape…:
This is how he exhibited it on location back in 2019 – and then posted a short video about it on his own Insta:
Check out the short 1-min video about it here.
The Spliced City 
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