Dave Hickey on Politics and Culture

Snipped from an interview in The Believer:

Sheila Heti: There are a number of artists I know who want to make art out of a political impulse, and this impulse seems kind of incompatible with art-making.

Dave Hickey: The political impulse is fine but moot. Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it. Miles Davis creates a constituency. Andy Warhol creates a constituency, and any object or occasion that organizes people in terms of what they want is a political constituency. The idea of political content is irrelevant. Content is irrelevant. I always tell my students, “Never forget you’re writing words! You know, word one, word two, word three, word four. The words have to be organized. Nothing else does."

SH: So if you eschew money from grants and from the government, then you’ve got to make money elsewhere—

DH: I wrote reviews of Porter Wagoner albums and squibs for titty magazines, but I fucking wrote them because I was trying to win and avoid all unavoidable compromises that presented me with the fantasies of comfort and security. I just like to write lucid prose. That’s my little thing. Why should it be easier for me than it was for Steve Tyler? Anyway, people don’t make literature, architecture, and art—the culture makes those things. We make books, buildings, and objects. We do our crummy little shit, and the culture assigns value to it, and I don’t think the culture needs government help.

I was also very excited to see that he will be lecturing at the GSD again next Spring.

A Hidden History Of Comfort?

Let it be known: if you missed the Bouroullec lecture tonight you probably missed one of the best lectures that the GSD has seen in years. Their work synthesizes the "logic of nature," an innate understanding of digital manufacturing, and unabashed cheekiness into objects of extreme aesthetic refinement. Not only is the work amazing but, in the tradition of the Eames, the documentation of the work is equally gorgeous (and telling).


According to Erwan, we are taught in a general sense how to appreciate things from an aesthetic point of view but rarely in terms of experience. There is, as he put it, a "hidden history of comfort" which is the accumulated knowledge of what feels good to the body. It occurs to me that there is a similar and equally perplexing hidden history of comfort that defines the most basic aesthetics of a culture like America. Although some countries have a clearly defined self image ranging from the scale of the abstract symbol to the specifics of architecture, America has only the abstract. There are things like the skyline of NYC, the suburban enclave, perhaps even the rowhouses of San Francisco which are somehow American, but they are not America. The comfort-aesthetic of America is a collection of stars and stripes and soaring eagles. Little else holds true as you test it against the far reaches of the country.

Can the term "comfort-aesthetic" replace "populism?" Like a crystal shattered into a hundred 67 pieces, there can be no populism in the age of We The Peoples. If populist desires tend to lean heavily on literalism, perhaps an aesthetics of comfort could be released from the need to be truly literal and instead must be simply comfortable (but not necessarily plush!)

note: I'm going to try not to write like this anymore. It's not productive for me.

Cappuccino Urbanism

This is not particularly relevant to my topic of research, but an offhanded use of the term Cappuccino Urbanism spawned some more thinking about growth of the city and the ways in which a neighborhood's identity is constructed.

In the fourth quarter of 2006 Starbucks opened an average of six new stores per day. In 2007 they opened an average of eight stores per day for a total of 728 new locations with just about a third of them being international. Thanks to a strategy of "cluster bombing," a technique of opening multiple stores in close proximity to a competitor they want to take out of business and subsequently accepting the cannibalization of their unnecessary ranks, it's hard to determine how many of these new stores are permanent additions to the roster. Starbucks' expansion is strategically foamy: it grows in multiples and benefits from spatial proximity by reducing costs. If there's an urbanism of foam, it's cappuccino urbanism.

As Saskia Sassen recently discussed at MIT, elements of the built environment are beginning to form a sort of spatial infrastructure whereby, once a vertical market has grown a sufficient foothold in a particular place, it sponsors the further encrustation of that locality with specific spatial and service amenities. Varick street in Manhattan is a perfect example of this with its concentration of architecture offices, print shops, and satisfyingly-trendy cafes and restaurants nearby. Perhaps one or two offices were attracted by the cheap rents and proximity to SOHO but now a critical mass has been reached. That Columbia University chose Varick street as the site of its Studio-X off-campus research laboratory is an indicator of the infrastructural quality of this part of the city. It's just easier- both physically and psychically- to set up shop. (A careful historical study of this area would make a great project for someone who is bored.)

As Sassen implies, this infrastructural architecture loses the identity of architecture and begins to melt into the city itself. It becomes a non-place, characterless coordinates (even if decorated). Starbucks' "cluster bombing" approach to expansion is thus the privatized, projective construction of infrastructure for that most trendy class of individuals, the knowledge worker. Redundancy is built in and standards are maintained as nodes in the system take on interchangeability. Compared to that other bastion of corporate expansion, McDonald's, the foamy model of Starbucks is infrastructural because it is primarily urban rather than suburban and thus explicitly recognizes the importance of proximity, of density. After all, disconnected infrastructure, that without regular use, is merely a relic- it gains its placeness back as it becomes discretized into the city.

That was fun, but now I better get back to reading the Federalist Papers.

Seen here is a map of all Starbucks locations in Manhattan as of 2005 compiled by media artist Cory Arcangel.

A brief and unexpected email exchange with Wes produced this nugget that will likely be useful when later evaluating the production of architecture as national symbol:

Judgement -> The Disciplinary -> Sophistication

The Berlage launches a studio this winter to investigate Seoul as capital city. No doubt this will include some investigation into the preparations to move the Korean seat of gov't to a new town built from scratch.

"Not only are Capital Cities contested political sites, due their obvious role in hosting the political functions of the nation-state, but especially because they are highly charged symbolic manifestations of their social, political, and urban vicissitudes. It is this that makes them tangible representations of the idea of the city as endorsed, or simply supported, by the constituted power. With the embracement of liberal-democracy by many advanced “democratic” countries in the world, the urban logic of neo-liberalism seems to be the only current political vicissitude of most Capital Cities. Against this scenario the studio seeks alternatives which are politically challenging the urban and architectural manifestation of the neo-liberal logic of urban space." link