Model for a Hotel 2007, Thomas Schutte, 2007/All Photos: LACAYO

It's summer and the weather is generally ok, so I've been going outside a lot at lunch for fresh air, sunshine and the chance to check out big, enigmatic chunks of public art. In London last week I finally got a look at Model for a Hotel 2007, a sculpture by the German artist Thomas Schutte that has occupied the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square since last November. (The Fourth Plinth is that pedestal where the Brits put various new works of public art.)

Schutte's Hotel is a sort of jaunty maquette for an imaginary proposed building. (Over the years he's done a number of these "models".) It's made from transparent plates of red, blue and yellow glass stacked like bookshelves. Among the gray stone edifices of Trafalgar Square, the opaque weight of the National Gallery and Nelson's Column, it's conspicuously light, transparent and colorful. And with its High Modernist/Russian Constructivist resoluteness, that hygenic simplicity of its lines, I assume it's meant as a mock emblem of contemporary happiness, the hotel as bourgeois paradise, though it's hard to be sure.

In that connection it reminded me a bit of Electric Fountain, the piece by the British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster that was up at Rockefeller Center in New York for a few months this past winter and spring. It was, just as advertised, a big steel sculpture made to resemble the gushing cascades of a fountain, with blue neon tubing and sequenced electric lights to imitate the flow of water. It had a cheesy Vegas merriment, and as with Schutte's piece, it was hard to know whether its power to charm was being mocked or celebrated. Probably both. Too bad it was set on a clunky gray concrete base that diminished the effect. The comment you heard about it most often was: "They do it better in Vegas".

There's a much better piece at Rockefeller Center now. (Though it's also on a clunky gray concrete base.) Chris Burden's What My Dad Gave Me is a giant erector set tower, 65 feet tall, a classic Minimalist box that's also a madly inflated fantasy from childhood. From a distance, it's a phallic daddy tower.

What My Dad Gave Me, Chris Burden, 2008

But get closer, and it's full of beckoning tunnels, psychologically intricate spaces, sparkling but intimidating, that undermine the monolithic impression it creates from further back. Daddy has his dark side. Or maybe it's Chris Burden who does. (Chris Burden — now there's a name straight out of Faulkner.)

But stand back again and look up. The whole thing seems to dematerialize into the sunlight, very much a boy's dream of power and glory.

I've been looking at Burden's work for decades and he remains a guy impossible to classify. But it would be fair to say he has a recurring fascination with power that links his notorious early performance works — being shot in the arm, nailed to a Volkswagen, etc. — with this ambiguous tower. In the 1980s he did an unforgettable piece that I saw in a gallery in Soho. It consisted of a large flywheel, about eight feet tall, mounted on a stand. From time to time somebody would back up a motorcycle against it and rev the engine. The motorcycle wheel would set the flywheel turning at high speed. Touch that thing and it would take your hand off. It wasn't just a representation of power. It was power itself, in the room, as the thing to behold.

I wonder what exactly it was that his dad gave him?

Greece and Italy have taken a step towards joint action in the smuggle struggle — the fight to regain illegally exported antiquities. (via) Greek Minister of Culture Mihalis Liapis was in Rome this week to meet with his Italian counterpart Sandro Bondi to discuss ways to coordinate efforts for the return of looted work.

For now it's not clear what their joint ventures will amount to. Somewhat garbled press reports mention technical cooperation between Greek and Italian law enforcement. But as more "source nations" reach out to one another to cooperate on this issue, Derek Fincham, on his Illicit Cultural Property blog, is wondering about the eventual possibility of what he calls "an antiquities OPEC". I'm not sure the analogy holds — OPEC is powerful because it sits on top of a natural resource that, at the end of the day, the world requires. Antiquities source nations have.....antiquities.

But as I read Fincham's post this morning I was reminded that last fall, when I was working on a lengthy Time story about the fight over antiquities, Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities and one of the most visible figures in this fight, mentioned in an e-mail that he hoped to organize an international meeting of source nations this year. But I haven't seen any further news on that idea.

What is clear is that in the aftermath of the success that the previous Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli had in his campaign to bring ancient objects back to Italy, Greece has been stepping up its own efforts. Earlier this month the Greek government announced that the important American collector Shelby White would be returning two disputed objects from her collection. (Which the Greek Culture Ministry specified that she had acquired "in good faith".) In January White, a major benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, also returned ten objects to Italy.

And of course, when the New Acropolis Museum in Athens finally has its official opening later this year, Greece will ramp up its campaign for the return of the Elgin Marbles from Britain. I wonder if there's any way for Italy to cooperate with that?