Detail of Chen Wenling's Wall Street bull pinning a Bernie Madoff-like figure to the wall.

Chen Wenling's "What You See Might Not Be Real" (detail shown above from a Beijing gallery) is pretty cool (and so are some of his other sculptures), and he's gotten some buzz for its bull/Bernie Madoff statement. But it misses that point entirely — unless the bull is Bernie Madoff's prison cellmate and not the Wall Street symbol.

Wall Street didn't kill Madoff, and Madoff didn't kill Wall Street. Madoff's Ponzi scheme isn't emblematic of anything Recession-related, and if he winds up symbolizing the era, that's a shame. If anything he was yet another victim of the Wall Street meltdown, because his phony reports of ever-increasing profits couldn't withstand comparisons with a simultaneously crashing market. The meltdown made the exposure of his scheme inevitable.

The Wall Street meltdown certainly wasn't caused by Madoff. It didn't spring (in general) from illegal acts, but from overly greedy, hubristic behavior that was legal but morally reprehensible and fiscally reckless.

That said, Madoff does have a lot to atone for — especially his ripoff of his fellow millionaires. He got excused from his North Carolina prison duties the other day for Yom Kippur, though he's always struck me as pretty unrepentant.

Before the atone-deaf thief was sent back to his cell, we hope he had time to wind up his Yom Kippur prayers with a joyful "Next year in Butner Federal Correctional Complex!"