By the turn of the 21st century, had the modern, Western gallery reached a terminal, evolutionary endpoint: where the memory of a century’s worth of experimental stimulation by seminal, Modernist provocateurs had been replaced by a widespread “amnesia”? At the same time, in the hyper-active, hyper-visible city-state of Dubai and the wider Gulf, Western capitalism and its attendant iconographies were being imported and amplified into spectacular un-recognition.How? Courtesy of a combustive union between autocratic state control, liquid capital, and an innovative array of governing techniques that saw the production of new urban substance as both catalyst and ultimate aim. Here, “freezones” are the planning and governing technologies used to create a streamlined sovereignty of “exceptions”: to cultural, economic, legislative and moral normatives. With these contemporary stories unfolding—where the culture of power is dressed in the power of culture, and vice versa—how might we look back at the rise and fall of one of Western culture’s most robust “concrete abstractions” (the modern gallery) in light of emergent 21st century cultural and political economies?