Forget Art. Coming to terms with contemporary ideology of “urban creativity” and what (ruinscape-) tourism might have to do with it.

An artist’s perspective from a suburbanizing inner city in the center of image attractivity.

Tegtmeyer, Lina

Graduate School for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstr. 5-9, 14195 Berlin. tegtmeyer[at]gsnas.fu-berlin.de, Tel: 0049-30-838 52 868 Fax: 0049-30-838 52891.

Résumé

What are current relations between art, the urban and tourism? How are cultural values of success and failure negotiated through and in tourism aesthetic? Is tourism ideology reproduced in urban art/creative industry practices?

Tourism has been taken into consideration as leisure activity and as service industry that has been affected by urban changes (“metropolization”) and globalization. In my research I propose to turn around the analysis by asking: how is the idea/l of the urban affected by tourism? The tourist provides an assumed relation between the depiction of a place (postcard) and the actual place (destination). Judd and Fainstein have argued that the urban constructs tourist bubbles for the visitors that disrupt other public space in a city (1999). Unlike Graburn’s idea of the tourist bubble from 1977, these bubbles are not class-based nor carried around with the tourist but rather the tourist goes into the spatially fixed bubbles. More recently, the tourists are taken into all parts of the city, to visit the off the beaten track has once again become the pseudo authentic. Different from earlier slumming—to gaze upon social misery—currently, poverty is disguised as life-style that is promoted in alternative markets through an aesthetic of decay (nostalgia). In cities like Berlin, New York and Detroit, tourism ideology is mediated via modern myths of progress, selling the tourist city as successful. Covering up for precarious living and working conditions, tourism is used as ideology of success, staging the brand “creativity” as freedom of expression (without art) in the contemporary city. Consumption of art is related to tourism through souvenirs in many contexts. In the post-industrialized urban in crisis, tourism and art are increasingly put in relation in different ways: on the one hand, loft culture and gallerization of urban space as well as gallery tourism put tourists and artists in a context that is highly affected by tourism mobility and class. On the other hand, image campaigns of shiny visuals of peripherical, disrupted, decaying spheres somewhere “outside” the official tourist bubbles that mass tourism convenes cater to a post-industrial aesthetic of DIY that is disguised as art, not as precarious employment attempts under global neoliberal conditions. Dissecting the brand/image from the urban space, ideologies of success and failure surface as ideologies. Image campaigns promote cities not as sites of production, but as products like Brillo pads or tomato soup. Image campaigns stage conditions of new urban poverty and alarming social bifurcation as creative nodes in a progressive, successful society.

Precarious social status, discrepancies in the freedom of expression under a democratic system in order to be able to sell art work and cuts in federal money to further destroy “the arts” are only some neoliberal consequences that need to be critically addressed to understand political and economic consequences of contemporary urban tourism as counterproductive force in urban development (“metropolization and globalization”).

This paper proposes to discuss the question from two angles: 1) from the practical perspective of the artist who lives amidst a city that is defined as creative node through image campaigns for tourism (“be Berlin”; “poor but sexy”), financed by government. 2) from the analytical perspective of the researcher, proposing a re-reading of pictures in tourism context along the lines of ideology. This paper would like to debate: in between tourism’s status as neoliberal service industry and as cultural practice, in how far is the power of image relevant for defining and constructing current urban spaces, including job markets and art markets. Is tourism as ideology of profit accumulation jeopardizing freedom of expression in democratic systems under capitalism?

Mots-clés

tourism aesthetics, artists, urban crisis, neoliberal ideology, periphery, Detroit

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lina tegtmeyer 2014