Rio : the CtR statue

I'm trying to think of monumental art that is actually artistic. And failing. Of course, it's the middle of the night, and I can only think of two -- the Christ the Redeemer that I saw yesterday (henceforth referred to as CtR for convenience) and the world's biggest Lenin head in Ulan Ude that I saw in 2007 during my ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway, but with both of them, you kind of think, "Wow! That's really big!", and then your attention wanders.

The CtR has the additional disadvantage of being on a platform from which the view is spectacular. Rather than craning my neck to look up at the rather bland lines of the statue, it was much more exciting and inspiring to look down at Rio -- the harbor full of ships, the tall downtown buildings, the red tile roofs, the beaches dotted with umbrellas, the favelas spreading in fine-grained detail on the slopes below the towering granite peaks, the vibrant green of the jungle covering everything that wasn't nearly vertical stone. And not just in one direction. Rio is spread out before me in a 360° panorama. The settlement started inside the bay on one side and has now spread around to the ocean shore to the south, around the bay to the northwest and across the bay to major suburbs reached by a nine-mile-long bridge that has worse traffic than Seattle's, plus expanding over the lower hills between the mountains -- everywhere you look is Rio or jungle or granite rising vertically to the sky. That holds your attention.

Some people, of course, want to take pictures of CtR. Again and again, it goes like this : person A stands with arms outstretched and person B lies down on her back on the tiled floor of the observation platform and aims a camera up to get a shot of person A and CtR against the sky. It is not possible to be anywhere that is not impinging on someone's photographic composition, except maybe that of the idiot atop the barrier, who I'm almost sure didn't actually fall off, though it was crowded and I may have missed it. The crowds were generally quite good-natured, thanks surely in part to the samba music on the train on the way up.