Nihilism for the Money

The Treachery of Images, 1928, Rene Magritte

Until very recently, nihilism was just a cultural stand that made leftists look culturally elegant. Since 1989, nihilism has become the common ground for right and left wing intellectuals, especially in American and European Universities. In fact, John Gray affirms in his The Enlightenment's Wake (1995) that nihilism is Western's "only truly universal inheritance to humankind", and one of the main reasons why non-western cultures will take the lead in the global world.

In my "Arquitecturas virtuales" in Revista de Occidente (2002), I related Koolhaas's architectural approach to a precise political praxis that had more to do with marketing than art.

Some political analysts consider now as postmodernist the right wing strategy of twisting the meaning of language to impose their ideas: "regulation is bailout" is the new one that tries to stop Obama's financial reform. The best example of the deconstruction of language for the money is Frank Luntz's Memo to kill the bill. The thing is that as a media strategy it really works: the lie of mass destruction weapons allowed already the huge business of the Iraq war. That was another initiative to take the money away from tax payers. Paul Krugman calls it the "black is white strategy".

PD (30/04/2010):

On the 28th Obama gave a strait answer to what I have called "Nihilism for the money". After saying that this crisis is not a cyclical one he responded to the "White is Black, and Up is Down" strategy. The three points of Obama's Wall Street Reform are:

1. Protection to consumers
2. End of bailouts
   
3. Financial Transparency

Have a look at the video:

Principles against poison

Yes, I know that I have already linked Ouroussoff's article in a recent post. The thing is that I have read the article again (thanks to a reader of the blog from New Zealand) and have decided to give it its own space.

The most "delirious era in architecture" is not going to be over just like that: years, maybe decades will be needed to overcome this "poisonous cocktail of vanity and self-delusion" (Ouroussoff).

By the way, have you notice that there is a consensus about "desintoxication" (see post under this) and "poisons" in the realm of contemporary form creation...?

Mirar para otro lado

The newspaper of Segovia has published and article of mine (in Spanish) that relates the financial and the architectural crisis. The main idea is that the utopia did not started with Fukuyama's "end of the history" but with the oil embargo of the OPEC in 1973. There are two more articles on the subject that are specially interesting: Joe Nocera points out in The New York Times the fallacy of the rationality of markets and Ignacio Sotelo, in El Pais, explains (in Spanish too) the differences between current crisis and the 1929's crack.

Myths on the Death of Modern Architecture: Pruitt-Igoe again

Just as history in Fukuyama's death of history, modern architecture is coming back form the other world. The thing is that in both cases there were false burials. In both the media contributed greatly in building a new utopia: post-history and post-modernity were sophisticated ways of being inside history and modernity. Modern utopia, which has always been the enemy of modern refexive creativity, as it turns into collective what is strictly individual, is behind the political burial of modern architecture. As an example, watch the video on Robert Hudge's obituary of Modern Architecture and read the abstract of the research of Katherine Bristol on the subject:

“(…) In place of the myth, this paper offers a brief history of Pruitt-Igoe that demonstrates how its construction and management were shaped by profoundly embedded economic and political conditions in postwar St. Louis. It then outlines how each successive retelling of the Pruitt-Igoe story in both the national and architectural press has added new distortions and misinterpretations of the original events. The paper concludes by offering an interpretation of the Pruitt-Igoe myth as mystification. By placing the responsibility for the failure of public housing on designers, the myth shifts attention from the institutional or structural sources of public housing problems.”

“The Pruitt-Igoe Myth”, Katharine G. Bristol. Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 44, No. 3 (May, 1991), pp. 163-171

The "occult powers of mobile phones" and the New Modern

What to read in the summer...? How about Black Mass by John Gray and Critical Modernism by Charles Jenks.

Why they should be read?. Well, I recomend them for two reasons. First, because it is not so easy to find intense reflexions on the present, on what is happening in our lives. Second, because Gray is considered "the most important philosopher alive" and he is the one Charles Jenks chose to back his new agenda at the Royal Academy in London last autumn. I find fascinating the intellectual moves from the New Right to New Labor (Gray) and from Post-modernism to Critical Modernism (Jenks). There is not better medicine for kantian idealists that big doses of post-ideological thinking: have a nice summer.

Koyaanisqatsi - Pruitt Igoe

Este vídeo es un fragmento de una excelente película con nombre imposible que sirve de ejemplo de cómo la crítica a la modernización ha salpicado al modernismo (Habermas). Es parte de una trilogía de un cineasta norteamericano, Godfrey Reggio, apadrinado nada menos que por Francis Ford Coppola, y que se dedica a criticar la vida moderna de una manera muy pero muy efectista y efectiva. La música es de un minimalista llamado Philip Glass. En el film aparece el conjunto residencial de Pruitt-Igoe, en St. Louis, Missouri, cuya demolición Charles Jenks usa en su libro El lenguaje de la arquitectura Postmoderna para anunciar la muerte de la arquitectura moderna, con hora y minuto de la defunción. Este es el link de un artículo que sostiene que el fracaso de Pruitt-Igoe tiene poco que ver con su premiado diseño y mucho con la gestión que de él se hizo: la pobre ejecución de las obras, la inexperiencia en integración, la coincidencia en el tiempo con la derogación por parte de un juez de las leyes de segregación racial, el regreso masivo de veteranos de Vietnam, la crisis economíca. PD: en el post del 27/03/09 está el trozo del video con la demolición de Pruitt-Igoe narrado por Robert Hudge el famoso crítico de arte australiano del New York Times.

Lo moderno y lo contemporáneo I

Pabellón de Barcelona, 1929, Mies van der Rohe (foto: silverfuki, flickr)

Museo de Kioto, 2001 Yoshio Taniguchi (foto ´colb, flickr)

El jueves toca conferencia: Lo moderno y lo contemporáneo. Pongo el primer párrafo de mi artículo de Revista de Occidente # 322 del mismo título (ver entrada anterior) para introducir el tema:

Desde su nacimiento en los años 1920 se dice que la arquitectura moderna ha muerto, que la contemporaneidad se ha impuesto sobre ella. Sin embargo, lo moderno y lo contemporáneo no son contradictorios en arquitectura. De hecho, a lo largo del siglo XX la arquitectura ha sido contemporánea siempre que ha respondido a su presente histórico, y ha sido moderna cuando lo ha hecho reivindicando su autonomía. Todavía hoy, ya entrados en el siglo XXI, la mejor arquitectura se caracteriza por atender prioritariamente al presente mientras ejerce frente a él el más depurado logro de la modernidad: la autonomía estética.

Dejaré en reprografía una copia del artículo. Nos vemos el jueves...