Quite often when I read mainstream American social science, especially of the “quantoid” variety, I’m reminded as to how much I appreciate literature. While acknowledging the importance of objective data collection and analysis in distinguishing social facts from all-too-fallible everyday perceptions, I also can’t help thinking that deeper, perhaps more significant meaning goes missing in the process. This occurred to me again recently as I perused the latest issue of the zine called Stupor, which for more than 15 years has surveyed the inner terrains of the shell-shocked victims of the class war known as neoliberalism.

Stupor was started in New Orleans in the spring of 1995 by writer and construction-business sole proprietor Steve Hughes and his friend Bill Rohde. It was originally supposed to be a vehicle for authors to publish experimental, confessional material. Not longer after, Hughes relocated to Hamtramck, Michigan, a mostly Eastern European enclave almost completely surrounded by the city of Detroit and once home to the now-demolished Dodge Main Plant, a massive automotive manufacturing facility that competed with Henry Ford’s River Rouge Complex as a paragon of vertically integrated mass production.

With the move, came the conversion of Stupor into Hughes’s solo project. Instead of publishing stories written by others, he began writing all of the stories himself, using anecdotes he collected from people he met or conversations he overheard in working-class bars, construction worksites, and elsewhere he came upon people talking.

As is typical of the genre, the early issues of Stupor are crude cut-and-paste affairs, produced in small quantities using one-color quick-printers and extremely low budgets. (According to the “History” section of the zine’s website, the first four issues of 1000 each were all published for the cost of two cases of beer.) With experience and the capabilities afforded by newer improvements in desktop publishing technology, the production values have been raised somewhat, but not to the level where one would call them slick. More recent issues have been done in collaboration with visual artists who interact with the author to create thematic mashups of image and text, form and content. The narrow, vertical format (the common letter-size sheet folded in half lengthwise) is intended to make the publication suitable for display on top of the toilet tank.

By the same token, the subject matter revels in all manners of abjection, chronicling the usually humiliating misadventures of those some might label a clueless pack of losers, but who I interpret as merely hapless unfortunates trying to cobble together some semblance of a life in an age of severely diminished expectations. (And there’s arguably no more iconic place for these hardscrabble social bricoleurs to do it in than among the ruins of the modernist utopia that is latter-day Detroit. One of my favorite Stupor lines that perfectly encapsulates the situation: “How can I jump, when I’m already falling?”) Rendered in the first person, each story is identified only by the gender and hometown of the putative narrator.
The newest issue carries the theme “Washed in Dirt” and it was done in collaboration with international art star Matthew Barney, who Hughes had met when the artist was in Detroit two years ago to work on a performance piece titled KHU, the second of a seven-part performance cycle inspired by Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings. (For my review of the event published in the Brooklyn Rail, click here.) With its consistently typeset font, neat, unbroken text columns, and color images throughout, the package seems a little un-Stuporish to me, a little too tidy and professional, especially given the theme. But the stories don’t disappoint, especially “Male, Clinton Township,” an episode about a young man “spiraling into a pit of impurity” with his Bible-study partner. The centerpiece drawing by Barney, part of the KHU performance documentation, depicts the effluence of the City of Detroit sewage system at the intersection of the Detroit and Rouge Rivers, spreading out at the foot of the ecologically challenged Zug Island, to form a shitty brown triangle of eddying water current that also reads as a thatch of pubic hair, another nice element.

Many statistics can be and have been compiled to represent the ebb and tide of various flows — of capital, of population, jobs, home occupancy rates, etc. — on Detroit, patterns of what these days free-marketers call “creative destruction.” Stupor limns what it feels like to be left floundering in the wake of that process.

Click here to listen to an interview with Steve Hughes on the “Washed in Dirt” issue of Stupor done in collaboration with Matthew Barney, which originally aired on public radio.

This post also appears in Motown Review of Art.

I am often accused of being an optimist. I write “accused” because I take it as a mistaken characterization. I think it suggests that I am naïve and unrealistic. And as it happens, I don’t think I am naïve or unrealistic, and don’t feel particularly optimistic. I actually have a rather dark view of the human prospect, one of the reasons I am more conservative than many of my friends and colleagues. That said, I do know why people think I am an optimist. It is because I understand my intellectual challenge to be to find the silver lining within the clouds, to try to find ways in which it may be possible (even if unlikely) to avoid the worst. Thus, my study of the politics of small things, which started with the proposition that after 9/11 “it hurts to think,” and also thus, my investigation in my new book of the possibility of “reinventing political culture,” showing that political culture is not only an inheritance that constrains possibility, but also one that provides resources for creativity and change.

In Reinventing Political Culture, I make two moves: I reinvent the concept of political culture and I study the practical project of reinventing political culture in different locations: Central Europe, the Middle East and North America. I plan to use the book to structure a deliberately considered debate early in the new year.  At this year’s end, I thought I would highlight some past posts which examine the power of culture and the way I understand it pitted against the culture of power, which also exemplify the course we have taken this year at Deliberately Considered and a road we will explore next year.

First, there is the link between small things and the power of culture. In a small corner of Damascus we observed people creating an autonomous world for poetry. Clearly the present revolution there is not the result of such activity, though it did anticipate change. But I think such cultural work makes it more likely that the post authoritarian situation will be democratic and liberal.

I am convinced that art as art, rather than art as propaganda is crucial to the power of culture. Quality rather than political purpose, conveying a partisan message, is the fundamental basis of the power of culture. The independent value of cultural work makes it most politically powerful, informing our understanding of the world, helping us see alternatives. This is the case near and far, now and then.

Yet, I know that the instrumental use of cultural quality, wit for example, can be powerful, most clearly revealed in satire. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have helped me survive our maddening times. I became a Daily Show – Colbert Report junkie as a way to maintain my sanity after the re-election of George W. Bush. But Colbert and Stewart’s shows are so powerful because of the excellence of their work itself. Thus a cultural highpoint in television history was Stephen Colbert’s White House Press Corps roast of President George W. Bush (video below). He speaks truth to power, on the cultural grounds of humor. A big surprise is how this humor still is so important during the Obama years.

I think when it comes to the power of culture text is more important than context. But context still can matter. Much of what we say makes sense only when we consider where we say it and with whom. Thus I appreciate the posts by Vince Carducci on Detroit, its art scene and its meaning.

Vince and I disagree about the role of propaganda in art. He thinks, drawing upon his readings of the Situationists, and other radical cultural theorists that all art is one kind of propaganda or another. I think, drawing upon such imaginative writers as Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera, that art, when it is art, is not propaganda. I know that I am shaped in my judgment by my intensive experience in the culture of Central Europe, while he is shaped as he is by his experience in his home town, as its troubles intensely reveal  the crisis of global capitalism and its culture. I think that neither of us knows the truth, that our debate opens deliberate consideration of the power of culture, as an alternative to the culture of the powers.

This has been an ongoing debate this year at Deliberately Considered in the posts linked here but in many others. I hope we will continue in the New Year. Do have a happy one. I am not particularly optimistic, but, as Leszek Kolakowski once put it, I “hope against hopelessness.”

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 into play.

The third level of aesthetic community intertwines the “being together” of the first level with the “being apart” of the second level to produce a new sense of community, in the present and in its potentiality. It’s a recognition of what is, coupled with a prospect of what may be to come. It’s a sensibility, according Ranciere, which aesthetics shares with politics.

Some aspects of aesthetic community in Detroit:

The Heidelberg Project
Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project has been extensively written about. Its significance as an expression of aesthetic community has been less remarked upon. As is well known, Guyton’s project reclaims a largely abandoned two-block area in a neighborhood on the city’s east side. Its primary materials are castoffs the artist typically retrieves from around the city. One of the elements, the polka dot, festoons buildings and the street, conjoining elements of a broken urban environment into an aesthetic whole. Other aspects point to the second level of Ranciere’s concept, for example, the flat cutout images of New York taxis spread around the project, serving the needs of a public that isn’t there but could be if the environment were different.

Over the 25 years of its existence, the Heidelberg Project has moved from being simply an art environment to a community activity and education space. Kids shoot hoops at the basketball net set up in the center of the street. A regular schedule of events is maintained, bringing people together under a  multicultural umbrella. The 2011 Summer Solstice celebration featured demonstrations of Brazilian capoeria, music, dancing, and food. A gathering later in the summer featured a spoken-word performance event and concert of funk, hip-hop, and electronic music. The Heidelberg Project also has a library and recently began an endeavor to promote local ecological and social sustainability.

The City of Detroit government has had an ambivalent relationship with the Heidelberg Project over the last 25 years, including bulldozing over sections of it on two occasions, only to see it rebuilt and expanded each time.These police actions and their ultimate futility point to a political aspect of the Heidelberg Project. Again, Ranciere provides insight into the discussion.

For Ranciere, “the essential work of politics is the configuration of its own space.” Its essence, he writes in “Ten Theses on Politics,” is to make manifest the disjuncture between the state as a site of power and politics as a field of action — a field Ranciere calls “democracy,” the space created of, by, and for the rule of the people and their claim to legitimacy, regardless of station. And so it is that the politics of aesthetic community are on view on Heidelberg Street.

Detroit Soup
Another example is the Detroit Soup project founded by artist Kate Daughdrill and musician Jessica Hernandez. Detroit Soup is a monthly dinner-fundraiser for creative projects happening in Detroit. It takes place in a donated loft above a bakery in Mexicantown on the city’s northeast side.  Attendees make a $5 contribution and share a meal made by volunteers. Artists and other individuals present creative projects, which are then voted on by the group. The proposal with the most votes gets the evening’s proceeds. Grantees usually return at a later date to present the results of their completed projects. The funding amounts are small, but the process entirely grassroots.

During the course of the meeting, other activities take place. The most important is bringing various creative communities into contact with one another, a process of transforming aesthetic community as an idea into a democratic community in fact. What’s more, similar fundraising initiatives have spread throughout the city, providing additional nodes in the social network and strengthening the mesh of interrelationships among cultural producers in the city.

Because we have survived the most thorough divestment of capital that any major U.S. city has ever seen; because we have survived “white flight” and “middle class flight,” state-takeovers, corruption and the dismantling of our public institutions; because the people who remained in Detroit are resilient and ingenious, Detroiters have redefined what “revolution” looks like.

This revolution is still in progress and certainly far from being won; it’s a revolution that is both aesthetic and political. Its spirit is embedded in the city’s motto adopted in the wake of the Great Fire of 1805, as if prefiguring Ranciere by some two centuries, “Speribus meliora; resurget cinerabus” — “We hope for better things, it will rise from the ashes.”

This post also appears in Motown Review of Art.

In recent posts, Vince Carducci examining the urban environment in terms of psychogeography, derive and detournment, and the gift and potlatch, explored the art of Detroit, the city at the epicenter of Fordism and ground zero of post – Fordist devastation. While I think his inquiry is illuminating, showing art playing an important role in democratic society, I am skeptical about his political utopianism, as he stands on the shoulders of Marx and the Situationists and Ken Wark’s account of them. I don’t think that the full power of the artwork is captured as a critique of capitalism or that the full political significance of the work is in its message. We disagree, once again, on art as propaganda and how art becomes politically significant.

Artwork, and the world it creates when appreciated, is, in my judgment, more important than context. The art, its independent domain, is where the action is, which is then related to a variety of different contexts. To be sure, Carducci shows how this works. Detroit artists don’t only speak to each other, creating work that communicates for themselves and their immediate audience. They speak to the de-industrializing world, providing insights, suggesting an alternative way of living. But this can work in many different ways, not necessarily tied to political programs of the left or the right or the center.

Take an example drawn from two past posts: Ivo Andric novelistic depiction of The Bridge on the Drina inspired Elzbieta Matynia to reflect on the way that bridge, connecting Serbia and Bosnia, provided a space for interaction between people from elsewhere, at the kapia, the public square on the bridge, enabling civility. Her account, in turn, inspired me to reflect upon the bridges I observe on my daily run through the public park that was the Rockefeller estate, and provided me with critical perspective for thinking about the devastation of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last year. Andric’s novel informed Matynia’s cultural theory, which gave me insight into everyday life, helping me confront a major natural and man made catastrophe in Japan, which, of course, was far from the world of Andric’s creation. The metaphor of the bridge opens up an imaginative field that moves freely.

I think it is this opening that is key to the role art plays in a democratic society. Art as art, art for art’s sake without elitism, is about the development of imagination, in form. It informs opinion, which potentially makes democratic deliberations more fruitful.

Thus, as Paul A. Kottman draws upon the works of Shakespeare to gain insight into the character of presidents past, he seeks to understand the birthers’ convictions about President Obama. “Just as nothing is going to count for Othello as evidence that Desdemona loves him, nothing will ‘prove’ to the ‘birthers’ that Obama and the civic world he represents are trustworthy.” Shakespeare is not a Republican or a Democrat, obviously, but he can inform democratic judgment, about the destructive power of skepticism of the other.

And Cecilia Rubino uses theater to remember and commemorate in a theater piece, dramatically confronting the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, while Judy Taylor uses mural painting to remember and commemorate Maine’s labor history. Taylor was commissioned to do this work. Rubino is committed to the political project of labor. For one, the work is a result of a market transaction, for the other, a matter of political commitment. But in both, the work speaks beyond the market and commitment. It opens imaginative space. The removal of the Taylor’s mural from public display is a scandal because banishment closes. It is repressive, beyond left and right.

The opening of imagination that is art is sometimes tied to a political cause and sometimes it has little or nothing to do with politics. But the opening itself serves democratic ends. It battles against cliché.  It enriches public life and human capacity. Sometimes, this has immediate political meaning and consequence. Vince and I are different, but not really in opposition, in that he seems to especially value the immediate and I prefer distance.

In upcoming posts, we will explore art that informs public imagination more slowly, less directly: Daniel Goode on listening creatively in New York. What I find most striking about his mini-reviews is that they show how listening is a way of thinking, providing insight. The insight is politically significant, even without any specific political end. And this is not about elitist institutions and sensibilities, high art as the grounds for philistine status acquisition, as I think a post or two on the rap scene by another new DC contributor, Lisa Aslanian will show.

This post continues the analysis begun in Part I of this series, relating art in Detroit to concepts of the Situationist International. Part I provides an introduction and discussion of the concept of psychogeography. Part II discusses the concepts of derive and detournment. The final part, part III, looks at the gift and potlatch.

A second Situationist concept relevant to a discussion of the art of the commons in Detroit is derive, typically rendered in English as “drift,” the practice of meandering, unpredictable explorations of an environment in which its psychogeographic characteristics are exposed. The artist Scott Hocking has been exploring the nether regions of the erstwhile Motor City for more than a decade. In addition to sculptural installations that respond to the physical environment, the artist has recorded his perambulations in a series of documentary photographs organized under topics such as “bad” grafitti, abandoned boats and other vehicles, and present-day locations that were once sites of ancient burial mounds. As Debord notes in “Theory of Derive,” derive isn’t an entirely aimless pursuit, but one driven by an awareness of psychogeographical effects. One of Hocking’s more noteworthy derives is Detroit Love (2007-present).

The project is a miscellany of picturesque images of scenes around the city, moments in place and time that reveal the artist’s emotional connection with the environs. The images are often tinged with irony, capturing residues of the collective memory slipping away. Others show the persistence of the life force amidst the ruins. Among the former are Grand Army of the Republic, a head-on view of a Romanesque structure, built in 1899 originally for the Civil War veterans of the Union Army. Shortly before the last vet died in the early 1940s, the City of Detroit took over management of the building, using it as a social services and community center until closing it permanently in 1982. Another is Blue Bird Inn, which in the 1950s and ’60s was a mainstay of Detroit’s vibrant jazz scene, featuring local artists like Tommy Flanagan, Kenny Burrell, and the Jones Brothers, Elvin, Thad, and Hank, all of whom would go on to become major figures of the post-bebop era in New York City. Among the latter are images of the city’s wildlife now free to roam the depopulated zones being reclaimed by nature, the process whereby the beach beneath street has been revealed. Each image reflects on the environment in an archeological way not from the perspective of nostalgia. Each represents different aspects of the here and now, for better or worse.

A third concept is detournement, diversion or derailment, which is the practice of reusing existing cultural expressions in a way that gives them new meaning and effect. On a formalist aesthetic level, this can be seen as basically the practice of collage, which since the time of the Cubists has allowed pieces of the broken world to be incorporated into works of art. But from the Situationist point of view, it specifically refers to interventions into the materials, processes, and codes of the culture industry (or as the Situationists would have it, spectacle society) the ephemera of a throwaway civilization. As Debord and Letterist Gil J Wolman write in “A User’s Guide to Detournement” (1956), “The cheapness of [the spectacle’s] products is the heavy artillery that breaks through all the Chinese walls of understanding,” a statement itself detourned from the description by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto of the role of low-cost commodities in propagating the hegemony of capitalism around the globe.

George Rahme makes work using the remix aesthetic that Situationist detournement anticipated. In the present day, remix has penetrated popular culture primarily through the sampling, looping, and other sonic manipulations of club music, a creative form in which the artist is also proficient, having performed as a musician and DJ in the US and Europe. In his visual production, Rahme similarly assembles found and common materials into scenic mixed-media extravaganzas that look like the hallucinatory reveries of a schizoid Thomas Kincaid (or perhaps it’s just an overdose of X).

Many of Rahme’s works use cheap art reproductions retrieved from thrift shops and other secondhand sources as their foundation. These kitsch substrates are embellished with collaged elements and hand painting. The resulting pastorals can be read as allegories of postindustrial Detroit, a city that as Ground Zero of Fordist modernity was first made and then unmade by the commodity system.

A popular genre much in the news these days is ruin porn, mostly photographic representations of Detroit’s decrepit physical plant that meditate on the half-vacant city as a memento mori of capitalist over-accumulation. The ruin figures prominently in the art of the Romantic period dating back to the late 18th century. And the sublime awe of nature in the process of reclaiming the provinces of culture is a significant impulse within it as well as in the fetishizing of decay in ruin porn with which it is inextricably connected. Rahme seems to take aim directly at these postmodern Romantics with his lowbrow amalgamations of bad taste, using the detritus of consumer culture, and in particular so-called high art that has been run through the grinder of the spectacle’s image processor and rendered banal, to expose its collective id.

The small collage 8,557 (2009) is a direct take off on Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea Fog (1818), one of the most famous images of German Romanticism. Rahme’s version is constructed on top of a poster of the Alps that features the names of various mountain peaks and their elevations. The title happens to be the elevation of the Scheien Pass near Davos in Switzerland. Besides being a popular ski resort, it’s also the site of the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum, one of the prime mechanisms through which what London School of Economics sociologist Leslie Sklair terms the transnational capitalist class quite literally rules the world. Numeric indices are the blunt measuring stick by which capitalism rationalizes all things. And it was Fordism’s failure to “make the numbers” that inevitably led to Detroit’s decline in the face of globalization.

Below: Kristen Gallerneaux’s recording of Scott Hocking’s practice of derive.

Get In My Car & Drive: Nowhere in Detroit (Episode 1) from Kristen Gallerneaux on Vimeo.

Coming next part III: the gift and potlatch in the art of the commons.

In reading and reviewing McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International, I couldn’t help but think about the practice of art in the city of Detroit. Wark’s title refers to the Situationist idea of deconstructing the process by which nature has come to be overwritten by culture particularly in the urban environment. This in part entails the recognition that:

“The conceit of private property is that it is something fixed, eternal. Once it comes into existence it remains, passed in an unbroken chain of ownership from one title-holder to the next. Yet in the course of time whole cities really do disappear. We live among the ruins. We later cities know that cities are mortal.” (29, emphasis added)

In the case of Detroit “the course of time” has progressed rather quickly, basically with the onset of post-Fordism in the early 1970s, though some commentaries rightly see the seeds as having been planted in the suburbanization of the region that began soon after the Second World War. This reversal of the conceit of private property provides the basis for what I have called the art of the commons, art that is neither public nor private but that exists in a space in between. And many of the practices that comprise this work have something in common with what Wark tells us about the Situationists. In this post, I will reflect on the Situationist understanding of  psychogeography as it appears in Detroit art work. Part II will similarly examine derive and detounement and part III will analyze the gift and potlatch.

In the “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” the Situationist theorist Guy Debord writes that psychogeography concerns the study of “specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviors of individuals.” One of the more well-recognized mappings of the ghost world of Detroit is the one undertaken by Tyree Guyton on the city’s East Side in the form of the Heidelberg Project. Guyton objectively and subjectively marks out the territory of his experience over the years of the neighborhood where he grew up.

The objective might be best represented in the form of the polka dot, which Guyton uses to delineate physical space and to unite the public sphere of the street with the private domain of homes long since abandoned.

An example of the subjective is Soles of the Most High, a tree clad with scrap wood on its trunk and festooned with shoes hanging from its crown.

“Shoe trees” have a number of interpretations, from simply banal evidence of practical jokers tossing footwear out of their owners’ reach, to more sinister explanations of gangland territory marking rituals to folklore legends of serial killers using them as trophy displays of their victims. In Guyton’s case the tree takes its inspiration from the artist’s grandfather, Sam Mackey, a descendent of slaves who helped start the Heidelberg Project in 1986 and who had told Guyton of lynching trees from his youth in the rural South where all that passersby could see were the soles of the victims’ shoes dangling overhead. (For more on the visual representation of lynching in Guyton and other contemporary art, see chapter 6 of Dora Apel’s Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob, Rutgers, 2004, which has a detail of Soles of the Most High on its cover.)

Embedded within this apparition is the psychogeographical trace of the exodus that took African Americans from sharecropping peonage in the Jim Crow South to “free” wage-labor in the factories of the Promised Land in the North, a redemption that turned out to be only too short-lived as the sense of terroir established in neighborhoods such as Heidelberg disintegrated under post-Fordist deindustrialization and urban disinvestment, which has ironically opened up vast tracts of abandoned land in Detroit that are fertile grounds for the practice of the art of the commons.

Coming next, part II: Derive and Detournement in the art of the commons.

Vince Carducci blogs about art and other aspects of culture in Detroit at Motown Review of Art. He has also written for Artforum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other publications.

On January 3, the online culture news service Flavorwire ran an item on a new book of photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre titled “The Ruins of Detroit.” Marchand and Meffre are French photographers who worked in the city over the last year or so as part of Time magazine’s “Assignment Detroit” in which a cadre of journalists took up local residence and reported on what they discovered. Detroit has long been a poster child for urban disinvestment and Marchand and Meffre discovered plenty of evidence of it.

The genre Marchand and Meffre mine is known locally as “ruin porn” and artists of all media here have been ruminating on the city’s gradual return to the state of nature for decades. (For a couple of the more interesting examples, see the work of Scott Hocking and the blog of painter Stephen Magsig “Postcards from Detroit.”) But while the city”s deliquescence holds an admittedly romantic allure, there is another potentially more fertile tendency emerging that I’ve come to call “the art of the commons.”

The art of commons has sprouted up in spaces created by the erasure of the distinction between public and private as part of the city’s wholesale abandonment over the last forty years — there are upwards of 80,000 vacant buildings and lots in Detroit and the population is less than half the postwar peak of approximately 1.9 million. Artists and other social entrepreneurs are using this preternatural environment to rethink notions of community and the role of art and other aspects of culture.

Perhaps the most well known is The Heidelberg Project, begun in 1986 by Tyree Guyton. Working with his grandfather Sam Mackey, Guyton began cleaning up vacant lots in his neighborhood and used the castoffs collected to create dozens of outdoor art installations. As with other examples of the art of the commons, The Heidelberg Project can’t strictly speaking be considered public art because no sanctioning body has approved it, and indeed municipal officials have demolished parts of it more than once only to see new iterations appear almost immediately.

A more recent example is The Imagination Station, a collaborative project that purchased two adjacent burnt-out houses for $500 a piece with an eye toward creating a media center, living quarters, and an art gallery with a surrounding green space for public use. As the structures are being refurbished, the group has invited artists to create temporary installations from salvaged materials. Imagination Station uses a Kickstarter model as part of its fundraising strategy.

Microfinancing is also part of the relational-art tactics of Detroit Soup. Artist Kate Daughdrill and singer/songwriter Jessica Hernandez host monthly dinners at which artists and other social entrepreneurs present proposals for various community and creative projects. Patrons pay $5 to attend and then vote on which proposal will receive proceeds from the evening. Funded projects have included global-thinking activities like transcontinental video art transmissions to more local-action initiatives like neighborhood pocket parks.

As with any bottom-up endeavor, scale is an issue when it comes to what the future may hold for the art of the commons. For example, Detroit needs a new international bridge crossing to Canada for trade purposes. The estimated cost is US$1.8 billion, which using the Detroit Soup model would require everyone in America to attend dinner and unanimously vote in favor of the project. Whatever its limitations, the art of the commons has a lot to more offer as a practice than the gratification from ogling ruin porn.