Where Does Bernie Madoff Go in Dante's "Inferno?"

Here's a literary perspective on Bernie Madoff.

Mr. Madoff was 700 years too late to join Dante’s Who’s Who of sinners, but it is easy to imagine where the poet would consign this scam artist, who admitted to stealing as much as $65 billion: to the Pit, the Ninth (and deepest) Circle of Hell. It is where sins of betrayal are punished in a sea of ice fanned frigid by the six batlike wings of the immense, three-faced, fanged and weeping Lucifer.

Yup, hell does freeze over.

Madoff Painting at Armory Show Goes Unsold

One of the paintings that caught my eye and made me chuckle at this year's Armory show was a a 60-inch-by-90-inch watercolor portrait (see my photo above)  of the now notorious Bernie Madoff, a finance genius who confessed to operating a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Painted by Chinese-born artist Yan Pei-Ming, it remained unsold at $100,000.

Given the economic crash, it was hardly surprising that no one wanted to pay six figures for a portrait of one of the most vilified figures in the world. Writing by e-mail from Paris, Mr. Yan said he had finished the painting in one day, and chose Mr. Madoff because he was “a kind of symbol of the economic crisis, a kind of personalization of the savage speculation, without control.”