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