VARNISHING FACADES, ERASING MEMORY READING URBAN BEAUTIFICATION WITH CRITICAL WHITENESS STUDIES

• Authors: Raccanelli Laura
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The paper addresses the contemporary features of aesthetic capitalism (Böhme, 2001; 2017) in the city, connecting beauty studies with established analyses of ‘territorial stigmatization’ (Wacquant, 2007) in the framework of critical whiteness studies. My argument is that beautification practices in marginal public spaces can be regarded as an attitude of aesthetic neo-colonialism. The text investigates the role that art plays in establishing spaces of difference, focusing on the analysis of the idea of beauty exhibited and used in processes of urban transformation. This beautifying operation could mask the intent of domesticating the ‘urban exotic’, representing the aesthetics of the ‘urban other’, overlapping processes of hypervisibilization and invisibilization within the production of normative white visual domains. The resulting transformation is viewed as a new field of value extraction from the urban space while at the same time being a new arena for privilege and inequality production.

Keywords

EN

URBAN BEAUTIFICATION; AESTHETIC CAPITALISM; STREET ART

• Publisher: Society for Aesthetics in Slovakia ad Institute of Aesthetics and Art Culture
• Journal: ESPES
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 88 – 102

Contributors

author

Raccanelli Laura

• University of Milan Bicocca, Department of Sociology and Social Research, Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo, 1 20126, Milano, Italy

Identifiers

DOI

10.5281/zenodo.10498887