Overview

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.

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'The borders between art, media, advertising, and popular culture have become increasingly permeable, 'Apel writes, 'as visual imagery easily ranges across these formats and as people produce their own imagery on websites and social media.' And the aestheticized ruination of Detroit feeds into a more widespread (even global) 'anxiety of decline' expressed in post-apocalyptic videogame scenarios, survivalist television programs, zombie movies, and so on ...Much of the imagery analyzed in Beautiful Terrible Ruins seems to play right along with that social vision.The nicely composed photographs of crumbling buildings are usually empty of any human presence, while horror movies fill their urban landscapes with the hungry undead - the shape of dreaded things to come. --Scott McLemee Inside Higher Ed

Writing against the genre of ruin porn, Dora Apel's wonderful Beautiful Terrible Ruins reveals the way decay is inbuilt into capitalism at its creation. An excellent and penetrating study. --Greg Grandin author of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (09/24/2014)

Author Information

DORA APEL is a professor of art history and visual culture and W. Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair in Modern and Contemporary Art History at Wayne State University in Detroit. She is the author of War Culture and the Contest of Images (Rutgers University Press).  

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