• Beautiful Terrible Ruins, Introduction

    Author(s):
    Dora Apel (see profile)
    Date:
    2015
    Group(s):
    History of Art
    Subject(s):
    Cities and towns--Study and teaching
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    capitalism, industrialization, art and politics, detroit, Urbanism
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/mxt1-0t84
    Abstract:
    Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit’s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit’s abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Book chapter     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.36019/9780813574097
    Publisher:
    Rutgers University Press
    Pub. Date:
    2015
    Book Title:
    Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline
    Author/Editor:
    Dora Apel
    ISBN:
    9780813574097
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    2 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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