The Event Landscape: The Contemporary Encounter of Art and the City

Today, as arts industries venture ever more frequently out of their traditional architectures and into the streets, as urban spaces are converted into venues for art at a fever pitch, we are witnessing the mutual recomposition of art and the city. The ways we experience both art and the city, and the ways we conceive of them, are being transformed. If those of us charged with the care of art and the city (artists, curators, producers, and other art workers; architects, planners, policy makers, and other urbanists) want to engage this reciprocal shift, we will have to do more than simply join the mounting chorus celebrating the obvious facts that the city is being redesigned to accommodate the arts and that the arts are activating the city. There is a larger project in play, visible if we step back to take stock, first, of the particular ways art and the city are becoming intertwined today and, second, of the fact that this intertwining is not new, that art has long been entangled with the city. This essay attempts to trace the contours of the encounter now unfolding between art and the city, accounting for the specific ways it reinvigorates and complicates the historical affinities between the two, in hopes that we can harness the energy of their mutual recomposition to challenge and advance our own work as art makers and urbanists.

THE EVENT LANDSCAPE

Art and the city are blurring not so much because they have turned towards one another, but because each has turned towards events. Walking through New York City, the city in which I live, I always seem to be coming across the pop-up white tents of officially permitted street fairs and farmers’ markets, the aluminum truss and stage lights that frame performances in plazas and parks, the white cocktail tables and black waiters’ uniforms of galas and receptions and weddings. Box trucks rumble down the streets to unload flight cases of rented AV equipment and laundry carts full of festive drapery at hotel conference rooms and rental halls. All this speaks to the frenzied ubiquity of events in the most prosaic sense of the word: event production.

Each day the special events sector assembles events from dispersed networks of competing vendors, supply stores, and labor pools, delivering on-demand cultural experiences. Set-up starts early in the morning and by the end of the night these spectacles are broken down into their component parts, the modular stages and decorations ferried back to the various warehouses on the city’s periphery from which they came. Events in this sense represent an ascendant mode of cultural production characterized by flexible assembly, ephemerality, and the congregation of audiences. Our contemporary expectations about the city, about what the city is and what happens in it, have become bound up with this mode of production.

Twenty-five years ago the geographer and social critic David Harvey, describing what was then a relatively recent economic development, wrote that “the need to accelerate turnover time in consumption has led to a shift of emphasis from production of goods . . . to the production of events.” ¹ Since the 1970s, the global North has been steadily turning away from the diminishing returns of manufacturing and towards more ephemeral products and services. As Harvey and many others have pointed out, this trend is just one signature feature of contemporary global capitalism’s defining upheavals. Others have included: the intentional reduction of product lifespans; an exponential increase of advertising budgets and other strategies to stimulate consumer demand; the migration of industry out of Western nations; and, crucially, a drive to increase productivity that has led to a reliance on flexible production methods — practices such as subcontracting (rather than full-time employment) and “just-in-time” materials provision by third parties (rather than older, all-under-one-roof, factory assembly). There is no clearer illustration of these shifts than the ascendance of events as a mode of cultural production.

The turn towards events has produced a corresponding event landscape: an urban fabric defined by its diverse venues, all of them mandated...