HNAR-386: The Art of Gentrification

In this course, we will examine how works of art-from novels to popular TV shows like Netflix's Gentefied, from contemporary poetry to works of video, sound, and street art-grapple with and seek to represent gentrification. The basic wager of the course is this: that gentrification is such a pervasive (yet at the same time such an elusive) social, political, and economic process that we can most clearly understand it by examining how our culture has tried to represent it. Our inquiry will unfold on at least two levels. On the one hand, we will analyze contemporary artworks with an eye to their form, examining how these works' techniques of representation-e.g., the point-of-views they adopt, the genre conventions they employ, the types of characters they ask us to accept as "real"-expose the ways gentrification has challenged and transformed our sense of political agency, our notion of solidarity and subjectivity, and our experience of home. On the other hand, we will explore how the so-called "creative economy"-which includes art institutions like galleries and museums as well as written and visual works that depend on their connection to specific neighborhoods or places-can and frequently do function as value-creating tools for real estate capital. As such, we will be posing hard questions about how we, as artists and cultural producers from a wide variety of backgrounds, do and don't participate in gentrification in different ways. Our guiding question throughout the course may very well be this one: what does genuinely anti-gentrification art look like? Who is making such work and how might we make it ourselves?