The "Little" Tower of Babel (c. 1563) Pieter Bruegel the Elder Oil on panel (60 x 74.5 cm) Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands Recorded September 3, 1996

The clamor that the tower once gave rise to occasionally revisits it in the form of a quizzical sussurus generated by groups of Boymans visitors. The moment that defines the story of the tower - the slippage of language to noise - is now forever warded against by curators, historians, museum staff, and admission prices. What is left at the site of the painting is the sound of a noise-reduced culture, one in which moments whose instant is anticipated here can never happen; the ruckus of the soon-to-be-vacated tower silenced in perpetuity by the museum that houses it.