Today is not a time for monuments; it is a time for ruins. What front page of a newspaper is not splashed with images of social collapse, disaster, and grief that transfix us with their mournful beauty and fill us with lurid fascination? Whether in news photos of ecological destruction like that wrought by Hurricane Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan, or of the social unrest rapidly destabilizing political regimes around the Muslim world and elsewhere, the image of the ruin has come to define our historical juncture. In art, as in popular cinema, a similar impulse holds sway. We have become a culture of melancholics, indulging in sublime devastation in any number of films that portend global and national disaster. (Just recall Hollywood’s recent offerings. And when we seek escape from these extravagances in contemporary art, we encounter the ruin once more in the recent nostalgic exhumation of modernism, and lately, in images of antiquity in the work of Jeff Koons, Sara VanDerBeek, Justin Matherly, and others.1 Today, in both Hollywood and its ostensible opposite, it is the image of a fragmented, mournful past that comes back to caution our present and foreshadow our future.