A Transition from Art Curators to Cultural Urbanists

Following on a recent reminder of how competitive finding an academic position can turn out to be, I wonder if there are options for taking up a position in between the fields of art, academia, and cities. Just as curators have emerged on the interface between art worlds and their social environments with institutionalization quickly following suit of their emergence as a distinct social role, perhaps urbanists that seek to mediate culture and cities might be able to perform the same transition in the uncertain terrain of emergent institutionalization of novel social roles. Largely, it must have been a de facto legitimization of curators' functions as art exhibitions have received social, economic and urban functions previously unforseen by art historians. As art history has entered the period of its theoretical crisis, dating to around thirty years ago, it seems that the field of art became ripe for a kind of transition that the agency of curators as power brokers has only sped up. Similarly, I assume the coming end of social theory as we know it, not unlike the withering of art theory, readies the larger social field of cities for a new breed of cultural power brokers that might find in urbanists their embodiment.

Between a Twit Posting and a Page-Length Blog

With the re-twit and facebook-on buttons slowly becoming an accepted part of our Internet experience, it does appear that a new space of reflection and writing has opened up that bridges the direct access to a link's referred web page and a one-liner message that only ever stays with us as we page newspapers through, scroll down the instantly updated blog-roll walls and scan twitter collections of concise news. It is like plugging the excitement of what captures imagination in an article into a tool that keeps the mental side-page note jottings written down, even if in a provisional blog format. It seems that what makes news novel cannot be merely captured in their factual content alone but requires reaching out to the similar moments of abrupt change, shifting circumstances, and unexpected constellations that in a flowing narrative form still wait for brief tags that would pull the outlines of a possible argument from the closely related to the subject matter accounts of authors who put feature articles together. It is not just the brevity but also the possibility to take comparative scope into account that does turn blog writing into a distinctive genre that can build on wikipedia articles. on-line magazines, and internet newspapers.

Discovering the Inner Man without Qualities

Capturing the moment in words is never easy. It is especially so when an uncertain moment is upon someone. I am not sure how much difference does it make when this someone is me. This indifferent difference must be due to the impact that the idea behind Musil's book The Man without Qualities has on its attentive reader who cannot but laugh at its occasional estranged descriptions of human foibles, or at occasional tender contourings of the qualities of the place and age it was written in. Not that anyone can vouchsafe how much difference or similarity there is between here and now and then and there. Wherever and whenever the former are. In other words, as Musil apparently takes the notion of qualitieslessness to a degree of theoretical lucidity all the while staying within the confines of novel as a genre, the novel becomes a thing whose qualities gain foothold if only in the field of imagination and attention of its occasional readers. The background to this consideration is, of course, Joyce's Ulysses that with a more or less elitist bent sets the standards of what counts as worldwide recognized literary genius. With the barriers of translations, translatability, and unequal paces of linguistic development, since it seems that English went through far more many transformations and changes than German did, the masterworks from the interwar margins of Europe still seem to be clamouring for attention globally. Even more so is the fate of even more marginal peoples and places. Which makes me think of whether the in-between world of post-Hapsburg literature and memory can be instructive of strategies for overcoming global marginality of language, geography or culture.

From Parisian Arcades to Everyday Life via Cultural Capitals

Walter Benjamin's collection of disparate citations and comments that was brought together under the title of Passages- or, better known as, Arcades-Project opens with a common-place description of Parisian arcades that he cites from a city guide from mid-nineteenth century. What catches Benjamin's attention is the names of the shops and establishments brought under the roof of the then novel form of urban space, that of arcades. Overwhelmingly, as he remarks, these names brought famous operetta plays of these days to mind with their frivolous, exotic and seductive titles. Just as, later on, Benjamin's work on shopping arcades in Paris was taken to be paradigmatic for research on different kinds of space, themselves compared to these arcades, one could follow Benjamin's associative lead to make a connection between these original spaces and Parisian operettas. Notably, Kracauer saw operettas as a genre paradigmatic of the epoch and the city, Paris, where they were created and have exerted their influence, not least on the imagination of the everyday life that the practices of these first shopping malls corroborate. To this day, European shopping malls, such as one built in 2004 in Weimar, Germany, bear a heavy cultural imprint of collective imaginary that they represent in their fusion of coffee-houses, decorative interiors, and cultural references, located, ironically, in the super-structure of that building.

Global Cities as Sites of Neo-Fordist Production

Since the thesis on disorganised capitalism by Lash and Urry (1987), the question of urban organisation that would be taking shape in the wake of the transition to post-Fordism remains relevant to the extent that cities as built, lived and imagined structures remain long after the last large-scale production plant or compound becomes reclaimed for cultural, entertainment or museum purposes. Different, less pre-programmed structures than those of organised capitalism replace the urban legacy of Fordist capitalism that as Ritzer's McDonaldization thesis would have it remains around, albeit in socialised forms of everyday life such as consumption spaces, communication infrastructures or interaction routines. Fordism as a product of standardisation, optimisation and replication may have had its day in its recognisable forms of Western brand-name corporations churning out durable goods. However, global cities as sites of post-Fordist production do seem to be sites of every bit as Fordist production organised around leisure, brands, and spaces. What has changed is the higher share of unpredictable elements that are being put under the same standardising, optimising and replicating pressures as were products of organised capitalism. Urban infrastructure appears to be a perennial frontrunner of world-city makeover. Rather than blue-collar workers moving from one square of shop-floor to another, it is laptop toting creatives who zip though urban space in a factory without walls of post-Fordism. Exactly identical Starbucks environments greet globetrotters within the geography of global cities. Streamlined ergonomic design of airports seems to spread to multi-storey shopping malls, railway terminals and urban campuses. Google mail promises to turn into a full-fledged office interface, while Amazon's marriage of everyday life and shopping interfaces crosses international borders. Disorganisation seems to be actually on the wane, as far as everyday life is concerned. It seems that different kinds of organization and lack of it are at stake.

Asymmetric Geometry of Interregional Relations of Governmentality

The thesis of Hardt and Negri in Empire combines geography and power in a configuration of relations that it is not clear how they in their theorised by them form accommodate dynamic transitions from their one geometry to another. Post-imperial transitions could be such cases that are left undertheorised in terms of their local impact on the larger power constellations. The theoretical calculus of the force relations that apply to a given geographical spot may of necessity be affected by changes as a consequence of events that introduce asymmetry into previous power balances. Post-imperial transitions, such as that of the British Empire or the Soviet Union, introduce asymmetry into pre-existing relations in that far more agency becomes exercised in places that were part of a homologous structure of centre-periphery relations that dominated their larger geography. To various extents, such transitions in what appears to be democratic directions of development have something of a disruptive effects of other exercises of asymmetric power, such as revolutionary movements would. Post-imperial transitions, however, may have held the promise of holding a post-revolutionary chaos at bay, precisely because the changes in the geometry of interregional relations were called for to put their existing governmentality on a new basis, albeit at the price of significant changes on the local level.

Near and Far: Sence of Place vis-a-vis Necessity for Cultural Translation

Against the grain of the more wide-spread belief in globalization as a process that hardly knows any borders at all goes the everyday experience in places that are on the margins of the historical centers of economic, political, social and cultural accumulation. As Ranciere notices, there are preconditions for the distribution of the visible as it presents itself in public space. Taken and read globally, a geography of hot and cold zones of globalization emerges where destination and fly-over cities for cultural events inadvertently map each other with the tight web of relations of recognition and neglect, relevance and irrelevance, and being in touch and disconnectedness. Even vehicular languages have not only their history but also geography of effective use while the latter fractally ramifies all the way down to the smallest elements of urban space. In cities that suddenly became transcoded from protocols of open social access to differentiated economic availability the phenomenon of collective and individual falling out of the networks and infrastructures of the networks of translocal cultural, economic and social access forms urban landscapes anew according to an emergent logic of relations of neo-dependency and post-independence where the hightened value of vehicular media, such as language, internet and institutions, distributes what is visible and invisible in novel ways.

Cultural Re-Mapping of Post-Industrial Cities on a Sub-City Level

A spatial opposite to the development of city-regions as a driving force behind competitiveness seems to be increasingly defined on the level of city neighborhoods that as urban quarters of cultural life appear to independently attract both public and private investment alike. Moreover, in this shift from city to an urban environment on a livable scale the whole map of social relations that used to define what makes a city up begins to change in the direction of city as a plug-in into its everyday experience. How seductively city comes across becomes defined on a block by block basis as a sports arena is no longer seen as an investment that will vouchsafe for its anchoring function as a draw factor for businesses, individuals and media. A deliberative and fickle environment of real-time search engines, instant blog and comment publishing, and buzz, attention and interest economy brings about a reorganization of imperatives that make it necessary to have cultural appeal as an indispensable component of it-cities that not so much instrumentalize cultural and public institutions, such as museums, libraries and community centers, but have the latter re-map cities into hot and not zones that gain and lose appeal in the eyes of investors, officials and consumers on the sole basis of their cultural capital.

Cultural Production vs. Cultural Accumulation in Global Cities

What the current financial crisis shows is that global cities as centers of command and control do not perform their function as their common definition would have it. Apparently as the international interdependence betweeen the processes that make up what is conventionally called globalization grows, a congeries of interrelations that remain largely the same in their definition become unpredictably different in their dynamic effects. It would be difficult to argue that the global financial system has remained the same after the last financial crisis, whatever fuit bear the efforts to regulate its national or international components. Moreover, global cities do not appear to lose their importance even after the crisis that has as its epicenter at least one of them - New York. Not only alternative centers of economic accumulation arguably have a better chance at staking their place in the system of international financial relations, as these of the BRIC countries do, but also Manhattan's Wall Street may be ready for another come-back as a most proficient manager of the post-crisis imbroglio of the old and the new elements of the international economy that the less publicized regulatory measures in the US and elsewhere introduce in their wake. The cultural side of this process of accumulation resides, of course, in the decisions that are made around the world vis-a-vis what essentially is a common and global crisis. While most everything else becomes produced and consumed in an increasingly place-independent way, it is cities, and overwehlmingly for the global economic, cultural, political and social affairs world-important ones among them, that become true difference-makers in times of crisis because of their distinct cultures that they bring to bear on local and translocal decisions made in the past and present.

Dubai-Scale Urbanism as an Indicator of Lager Shifts

What commentators on Dubai's much reported woes do not miss to notice is that the scale of the transformation it has gone through to become a thoroughly newsworthy city is and remains tremendous. Rather than an imitation of other more historically auratic cities, Dubai erases the difference between the copy and the original by building rather than signifying skyscraper skylines, professional ski slopes and luxurious mega-hotels. Especially given the modernity of what goes on in Dubai, since hardly another Western city can compete with it in terms of the scale or scope of its urbanist vision, the materials, the standards, or the aesthetics of what it offers as a built environment do not fall short of any of their historical prototypes that in terms of how modern they are may have to give way to what happens in UAE and elsewhere in Asia. The unheard-of dynamism of the infrastructural transformation that Dubai goes through in purely urbanist terms makes its urban space into a part, and probably only a small one, of a larger shift of the nerve centers of global modernity, since it is the more modern environments that have historically pulled to them people, capital and ideas. Think of New York, the historical pull of which no one, however rich, powerful or famous, could resist in the twentieth century. One can argue about whether the contemporary configuration of global modernity represents a genuine break with the historical norms or regularities of what modernity used to mean or one can relativise the perspective from which the preceding narrative of modern development has been told as some of the commentators implicitly propose by telling that world has returned some six hundred years back in terms of the configuration of its leading urban centers of power, capital and culture. Asian come-back may herald a culture and future shock of once a millennium proportions.

From Capital/Labour Dichotomy to Diversification of Capital Forms

Historically the cities that Marx and Engels have encountered in industrializing Europe were built on a dichotomous relation between labour and capital that in the structure of their respective ownership organized urban space in accordance with the power relations that followed from it. In other words, the transition from pre-industrial towns to industrial cities did have something do with with the emergence of capitalism. However, as capitalism has made a transition from capital-holder to share-holder power-structure the ensuing managerial revolution has apparently introduced new forms of capital into the traditional opposition between capital and labour. It seems that the position within a more general power structure of particular groups makes them into possessors of particular forms of capital able to find independent valuation. From this perspective even labour becomes a form of capital as an embodied capital, as from photomodels to CEOs to consultants it is more general relations of economic, cultural and social exchange that set the price point for the investment of effort that these groups make to claim return on their aesthetic, institutional or educational capital. Capitalism producing manual labour as wage labour, as it sunders self-sufficient communities out their sustaining relations, can apparently produce other forms of labour within the constantly changing relations of economic, cultural, social and political exchange. The explosion of forms of capital, as, for example, highly speculative capital of future home equity valuations exemplifies, foregrounds their sites of reflexive assembly. If industrializing capitalism found in shop-floors its foundational topos, post-industrial capitalism may have its spatial counterpart in spectacular urbanism of overnight neighborhoods. It is difficult to overestimate the role of information technology not only in commodification of economic risk over the last two decades, but also in self-reflexive assembly of old, new and improved forms of capital and its accumulation.

From Use Value to Space to its Spectacular Value

What has caught my eye in an Australian newspaper article on the relations between contemporary artists from Australia and Japan is how graphically the urban space of the former has played a key role in promoting relations of cultural exchange between the two countries. The uneven balance of economic relalations that defines how Japan relates to Australia is apparently offset by the effect that the urban spaces of Australian cities have on promoting the media visibility of Japanese artists. Not being able to financially contribute to joint art projects on the same scale as Japan, Australia has successfully leveraged its urban spaces in order to provide an effective foil for the works of its and Japanese artists. It did not appear that the success of these art initiaitives hinge exclusively on the use of museum premises. Its nexus of relations at play apparently feeds on urban, regional and global interconnections that allowed the value of urban spaces in Australia to be translated into something akin to a spectacular value. The latter I construe as capability to become integrated into urban spectacles of various kind, such as art biennials, open-air concerts, cultural festivals. The global component that goes into making Australian urban spaces spectacular, as opposed to Japanese, may be a decisive one since it is Australia's relation to European and North American strategies of cultural accumulation that differentiates it from Japan. The rise of China in this respect poses a question of global shifts in the centers of cultural accumulation as its cities possess developmental, spatial, and populational density that is hardly matched internationally. This probably explains the networking of art biennials in East Asian and ASEAN regions to each other. This wave of cultural networking reaches also Australia as it starts prmoting the rise of Australasian cultural initiatives.

Art, Pleasure, Additiction as Symbiotic Environments

It is unsurprising to notice that Beijing's upscale art districts developments become reported in the mainstream art reviews in the same breath as do those of London. The latter's business district's woes seem to stand for the soundness of the British economy as a whole. The intense interest of global public opinion to the Chinese economy, that in contrast has only to count with a cooling down of a more buoyant than average economic growth, carries over to Chinese art scene as a heir apparent to the historical procession of urban centers that used to define what it meant to be modern. Generally it looks we have to count with a global modernity that is envisioned, made and broadcast in China. The hip crown flocks in its droves to the art events in the arts compound in Beijing with the same enthusiasm it arrived to celebrate the parties thrown on the occasion of the market successes of Young British Artists in London and New York. Young Chinese artists have recently hit the top ten of the highest yielding art market hot items that bring at auctions prices even a decade ago deemed unreachable for the artists from the country in the process of an unprecedented image overhaul. The financial ups and downs will temper the excesses of the betting classes on the rising stars of Chinese art. However, the cultural ferment, the intellectual outburst, and the social power that this present period may well be going through can be laying down the very framework of images, words and networks that will be key to how the history of the present period will be told.

From Massive Change to its Urban Focal Points

Historically I wonder if other moments of possibly massive changed have been greeted with anything like sagacity of its contemporaries. Interesting times seem to be upon us. However, our interest in the international and national goings-on seems to swing from obsessive-compulsive attention to a listlessly passive browsing and watching of news. Was it also as ennuieux as it feels to be when reports on industry, policy and society read as forgone conclusions? The condition is more emotional than intellectual though. Learned articles go over the movements of defense and repudiation, running commentary solemnly repeats tried and true formula, private response remains in an undecided state of mind welcoming things to come. Rather than for a community to come, the expectation is for a symbolic event to come. Like a Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. It had a force of a carnival, a play and a ceremony all rolled into one event. A massively symbolic representation of a place the urban dymensions of its change only dimly register on collective imagination of its observers. If all previous periods of massive change had their urban focal points, than one may surmise that the present wave of transition towards a yet to be explored situation will have as one of its more visible bases in China.