This is an extremely complex article that addresses a multitude of topics. One passage that stood out to me was
"Coming of age in the heyday of punk, it was clear were living at 29the end of something—of modernism, of the American dream, of the industrial economy, of a certain kind of urbanism. The
evidence was all around us in the ruins of the cities. […] Urban ruins were the emblematic places for this era, the places that gave punk part of its aesthetic, and like most aesthetics this one contained an ethic, a worldview with a mandate on how to act, how to live. […]
A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life. […] An urban ruin is a place that has fallen outside the economic life of the city, and it is in some way an ideal home for the art that also falls outside the ordinary production and consumption of the city.
—Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Although it was written by Solnit, I feel as though it is relevant to the rest of the small portion of the book we read. The last sentence refers to the ideal home for art as an urban ruin. It seems like a large cycle as the urban scene was made out of nothing from great artists and as it has deteriorated over years and years, it becomes a new element for artists to take advantage of. It is outside of the ordinary production and consumption of the city. Which I would consider as a good start for artists to find a source of inspiration. Profits would then come after this and would feed back into the cycle of economics and art as they go around and around.
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