By Vince Carducci, September 27th, 2012 
In the current issue of The Baffler, journalist Thomas Frank takes on the notion of “vibrancy,” a term which has recently come to underpin cultural policy at the national level. As Frank reports, vibrancy is an attribute of so-called creative placemaking, the stimulating effect that culture ostensibly brings to the local environment, a kind of artsy aura that is taken to result in economic revitalization in the long run. The concept of vibrancy is being promoted in particular these days by ArtPlace, a collaboration of the National Endowment of the Arts, 10 major foundations, including the locally based Kresge Foundation, and six of the nation’s largest banks. In Frank’s analysis, vibrancy is shown to be the latest term of art, as it were, that substitutes an ephemeral quality of hipness for the erstwhile solidity of a once activist welfare state. It’s the successor paradigm to the creative economy and other gambits of gentrification, shifting responsibility for the public domain onto private individuals, in this case artists and other creative types.
Much of Frank’s critique is well taken. And yet, one wonders what other recourse there might be at this juncture? What, to coin a phrase, is to be done? In this age of compulsory diminished expectations, working with what’s at hand, bricolage as an aesthetic approach and a way of life, seems like a viable solution if only by default. Hell, even The Baffler has a Kickstarter campaign underway.
One acknowledged agent of vibrancy here in the Motor City is Power House Productions, a nonprofit organization created by 2011 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellows Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert of Design . . .
Read more: Riding the Wave of Vibrancy in Banglatown
By Vince Carducci, February 6th, 2012 
Over the last year and a half, I have looked at the field of cultural production in Detroit through several lenses. As I’ve reflected on things a little more, I have come to see that these lenses are interconnected. What’s more, they point to a way in which certain art projects in Detroit are perhaps opening up an avenue for thinking about how we might actually go about making that other world the new social movements slogans tell us is possible.
I first have looked at Detroit from the perspective of what I call the art of the commons. This lens reveals a significant (though certainly not exclusive) tendency within contemporary Detroit art that has emerged in those spaces where the distinctions between public and private seems to have dissipated as part of the process of demassification of the city’s core, which has taken place over the last four decades. (As Marx declared, “All that is solid melts into air.”) The resulting abandonment of commercial and residential property, its subsequent neglect, and its reclamation in many quarters by nature has figuratively and in not a few cases quite literally opened up a new field of cultural production. Referring back to the medieval commons (land left open for grazing, farming, and other uses by anyone without requiring individual ownership — the term “commoner,” i.e., one without hereditary title, comes from it), the art of commons trespasses the boundaries of conventional property relations of modern capitalism.
The idea that private property is essentially an ideological construction, something legitimated by hegemonic authority underlies the psychogeographic investigations of the urban landscape undertaken by the Situationist International. This is my second filter. In particular, the SI concepts of derive (drift), detournement (diversion, derailment), the gift economy, and potlatch provide useful ideal types for understanding how cultural producers in Detroit negotiate the city’s postindustrial condition. (See the post “Beneath the Pavement, the Beach!” for my analysis of Detroit art . . .
Read more: Envisioning Real Utopias in Detroit
By Vince Carducci, December 20th, 2011 
In a recent contribution to the Huffington Post, author and community organizer Yusef Bunchy Shakur and co-author Jenny Lee write: “Detroit is modeling life after capitalism.” One of the ways this is happening is through the work of artists who are helping to envision what that life might look like. These artists are constructing what the French philosopher Jacques Ranciere calls an “aesthetic community.”
The aesthetic community of Detroit is more than simply a collection of artists and other creative types working in the same location. It’s a community of sense, as Ranciere expresses it, which operates on three levels.
The three senses of aesthetic community:
The first level of aesthetic community is a certain combination of sense data — materials, forms, spaces, etc. — that constitute the work. In particular in Detroit, this often consists of using recycled castoff materials, adopting makeshift techniques for fashioning them into artistic expressions, and doing so in locations that have been abandoned or otherwise marked by neglect. The notion of aesthetic community at this level comprises what Ranciere terms a “regime of conjunction,” that is, a bringing together of disparate elements into a meaningful whole.
The second level opens up a tension between this regime of conjunction and what Ranciere terms the “regime of disjunction.” The latter can be understood as the way the work points to that which is absent, specifically in the case of Detroit the sense of community dislocated as a result of the ravages of capitalism, the lack that registers the social, economic, and political deracination whose residue is emphatically apparent in the postindustrial wasteland of Detroit.
This aspect of aesthetic community is not the same as what another French philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy, terms the “inoperative community,” the longing for the original idea of community that was lost or broken in the transition to modernity, the dialectic of what sociologists term Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. That’s about Romantic nostalgia, the province essentially of so-called “ruin porn.” Instead, it’s what enables the third level of aesthetic community to come . . .
Read more: Aesthetic Community in Detroit
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