Après le déluge

Photo by Lee Celano for the New York Times

Like Venice, it has often been said, New Orleans is sinking. It is sinking literally, of course, into the soft south Louisiana mud from whence it came. Yet it is its social decline that may ultimately render it more akin to the proverbial Pearl of the Adriatic—gutted of local life, of indigenous gestalt, with only the quintessence of its streetscapes left behind, ripe for exploitation by blind capital—and the superficiality of sightseers. Unlike the functioning, workaday trade city, New Orleans’ raison d’etre has never been its industriousness nor even its creativity, but its self-preservation: that of its paradoxically dolorous joie de vivre, yet one that could only be nourished by social distress. And yet the city finds itself at somewhat of an unprecedented crossroads: the point at which cultural survivance has finally been disrupted by a far more crucial need for survival; its life-giving cultural paradox unwound and exposed.

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The Romance of Detroit, Institutionalised

The most salient feature of the ruin’s enchantment, as Walter Benjamin would put it, is “aura,” the distance one feels temporally from art. The Acropolis, the Pyramids, the temples of pre-Mughal India — all these embodied some mythic conception of the past and its tragic downfall. In other words, the romance of the ruin was enabled by passing time; in an earlier age, the ruin would have been viewed for what it was, mere structural decay. Perhaps a portion of an aqueduct would be used to channel water somewhere, or a temple wall dismantled for new homes, but otherwise, the use-value of such crumbling structures was denigrated, and with it their worth. So it was until enough time had passed and a bard like Byron or Shelley sung (for whatever purpose) the long lost virtues of the time that had produced the forerunner of ruin.

Detroit is not yet of age. Its factories, stores, churches and homes have lain fallow a mere four decades while suburban Michigan prospers and progresses with precision linearity into cornfield after cornfield to escape the blight of urban detritus that a nomadic population, on the run from the past, has left behind. Put another way, Detroit’s ruins are still seen by many as the failure of use-value; its forlorn, forgotten ironworks and auto assembly plants not objets d’art but underutilised machinery. Its abandoned parks and graffiti strewn alleys are not the touristic fantasia that animates that paragon of ruin, Pompeii, but reminders of an insurmountable failure. Detroit has not yet commoditised its failure; it merely wallows in it.

It is at this moment that Andrew Zago has unveiled his new Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the embodiment of Detroit-as-Pompeii, the romanticisation of its still-ostensible wounds.

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Upper East Exodus?

The Upper East Side is dying, at least according to New York magazine, in the latest issue of which Jay McInerney tries to convince us that the bastion of the New York elite is heading towards extinction. If such a proclamation is meant to be anything but hubris, however, it ought at least to come with a few caveats.

The first is that the existence of New York itself is partially driven by the very blonde-wigged, fur-wearing gossip mavens of whom McInerney flags the imminent decline; the article’s appearance is akin to those on the covers of political-science tomes asking if the United States’ power will soon be eclipsed. In other words, it has the effect of precipitating panic, demanding defences, and, above all, marketing magazines which contain within the secret signs of this dangerous denouement.

That said, it is hardly surprising that this purported “death” is really the product a soporifically-composed pseudo-sociology. Its greatest fault is this: its author inhabits a small world, one which is a stronghold of the superficial. In its characteristic enchantment with surface baudles and clubby clans it deludes itself–and McInerney–into envsioning an elusively myopic, narrowminded portrait of the city’s social strata. Wherever the diaspora (or whatever the death rate) of its bold-named mainstays, not only the social characteristics of the Upper East Side but, especially, the idea of the neighborhood are stronger than ever- whether or not either are synonymous with the neighborhood’s physical constraints.

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