Beautiful Terrible Ruins (Paperback)

Dora Apel

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Language: English

Published by Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ, 2015

0813574064 / 9780813574066

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Paperback. Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere-the paradigmatic city of ruins-and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit's decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster-in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit's abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit's deterioration as either inevitable or the city's own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline-corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall. Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the US, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere and the epicentre of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images. She shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a fear that worse times are coming. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9780813574066

Title
Beautiful Terrible Ruins (Paperback)
Author
Dora Apel
Publisher
Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ
Publication year
2015
Condition
new
Binding
Paperback
Language
English
ISBN 10
0813574064
ISBN 13
9780813574066

Grand Eagle Retail

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