building: the bleakness of a complete system

If commodities no longer dominate, this is because the salable product no longer carries the same importance, since history, technology, and art, as presented in the museums, have now become commodified. The principle of adjacent attraction is now operating at a societal level, imposing an exchange of attributes between the museum and the shopping mall, between commerce and culture.... The world of the shopping mall-- respecting no boundaries, no longer limited even by the imperative of consumption-- has become the world.

- Margaret Crawford, 30, "The World in a Shopping Mall," Variations on a Theme Park

building: epigram

William Kowinski identified mal de mall as a perceptual paradox brought on by simultaneous stimulation and sedation, characterized by disorientation, anxiety, and apathy.

- Margaret Crawford, 14, "The World in a Shopping Mall," Variations on a Theme Park

building: the misuse of art

The greater the separation of events from their constitutive geography, the more powerful the mythology and the more cliched the geographical landscapes expressing and expressed through the mythology. (69)

The rawness of the neighborhood is part of the appeal. "As for ambience," continue the critics, "the East Village has it: a unique blend of poverty, punk rock, drugs, and arson, Hell's Angels, winos, prostitutes, and dilapidated housing that adds up to an adventurous avant-garde setting of considerable cachet." (75)

...the artistic invocation of danger is usually too oblique to highlight the sharp conflicts over gentrification.... The art world's cooptation of violent urban imagery generally trivializes real struggles and projects a sense of danger that is difficult to take seriously. Social conflict is recast as artistic spectacle, danger as ambience. With the rapidity of openings and closings, movings and renamings, gentrification and decay, a landscape of happy violence becomes the stage for a dynamic and breathless form of geographical performance art. (77)

- Neil Smith, "New City, New Frontier: The Lower East Side as Wild, Wild West," Variations on a Theme Park

continual building

Prehistory all over again: the ring-within-a-ring representing progress and modernity, disenchantment flourishing when the outer limits are reached. Now modernity itself is being displaced by deliberately postmodern architectronics, by a new kind of campus (field, level, plain), as the inner rings are left behind.

- Edward W. Soja, 104, "Inside Exopolis: Scenes from Orange County," Variations on a Theme Park

setting identity in a consumer world

Presented with a constantly increasing range of products, each promising specialized satisfaction, the shopper is forced to fragment needs into constantly smaller elements. These are not false needs, distinct from objectively determined "real" needs; rather they conflate material and symbolic aspects of "needing" in an ambiguous, unstable state. Because advertising has already identified particular emotional and social conditions with specific products, the continuous fracturing of emotions and artifacts forces consumers to engage in intensive efforts to bind together their identity and personal integrity. Consumption is the easiest way to accomplish this task and achieve at least temporary resolution.

- Margaret Crawford, 12, "The World in a Shopping Mall," Variations on a Theme Park