Clase cultural. Arte y gentrificación (Spanish edition, 2014)
Translated by Gerardo Jorge
Buenos Aires: Caja Negra Editora
ISBN: 978-987-1622-59-7
256 pages
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Since the collapse of the Fordist regime of accumulation in the early 1980s, it is impossible not to notice a vast transformation in the social, physical, and demographic structure of many Western metropolises. Real estate speculation, the outsourcing of industrial production, and the monopolies of the financial and technological sectors left traces of ruin and abandonment, and the conversion of working-class neighborhoods and industrial centers into artists' workshops and consumer areas. While all these processes converge in attractive ways to produce a semblance of economic prosperity, job insecurity and chronic unemployment are underlying but unequivocal features of the contemporary urban landscape.

In this set of essays, the artist and critic Martha Rosler analyzes the role of the visual arts as a strategic asset instrumentalized by municipal governments for the creation of real estate value and the invention of new consumption patterns based on the commodification of culture. Bike paths, craft breweries, the promotion of “emerging” neighborhoods, the proliferation of festivals sponsored by banks and foundations, the rise of biennials as a strategy to insert a city into the international art circuit and the construction of resplendent cultural centers are some of the recurring figures with which urban planners build a "lifestyle marketing" and design an ideology of creativity at the service of capitalist gentrification. With a repertoire of varied references, ranging from the theoretical work of urban management gurus to the Situationist dissection of the role of visual culture in capitalism and the immaterial labor theory of Italian post-operaism, these texts provide the fundamental raw material for understand the new forms that the class struggle adopts in the post-industrial city, and to question the complicity of the artistic community with the new consumption regimes.