A number of exhibitions this summer in Switzerland gave visitors the sense that the country’s image has become a source of civic obsession. The city of Zurich has sponsored an “action” in which some 800 plastic cows—lifelike, life-size, and bearing madcap designs—have been distributed throughout the city. They were enlisted to create an image of Zurich as “teeming with fantasy, joyful, and many-sided,” to quote the flyer announcing the event. An exhibition at the Swiss National Museum is titled “Inventing Switzerland, 1848–1998.” Its advertisements declare that “The Switzerland of the future