THE NEW CRITERION
October 2016
On the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit & the role of art in the history of the city.
Detroit is a city of art. Strange to say, but it’s true. While much has left this impoverished, often heartbreaking metropolis, what remains, surprisingly, is a rich art history, which is today right on the surface. With origins that run deep and predate the automobile, Detroit’s artistic roots flower over the city streets left empty by the cars that have, by and large, driven away. And they deserve attention, which is why I visited with the family on a late-summer road-trip, ten hours from New York, twelve by way of Niagara Falls—a rewarding and remarkable artistic pilgrimage.
It was a close call for Detroit to reach its current and still parlous state of the arts. Most of us had little idea of the Motor City’s artistic legacy until it was almost too late. After decades of decline, the bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler in 2009 hastened Detroit’s own insolvency, which in 2013 led to the largest municipal collapse in American history. Detroit was $18–20 billion in debt. As an emergency manager looked to liquidate assets, creditors made headlines as they closed in on the city’s remaining jewel: the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the country’s great encyclopedic museums.
The faith that those museum administrators once placed in the future of their city says much about the wild extremes Detroit has experienced over the last century. From a population of nearly 2 million in 1950, when it was arguably the richest city per capita in the country and the Silicon Valley of the Machine Age, today Detroit retains under 700,000 residents, experiencing a 25 percent decline in just the last decade as entire neighborhoods have been abandoned as ghost towns. A history of violence, Jim Crow, corruption, race riots, white flight, failed redevelopment, and monorails-to-nowhere has long accompanied these seismic shifts. Today much of the city seems more passively desolate than actively menacing, with weedy, empty streets and an abundance of graffiti-scarred architecture, some remaining from its Gilded Age. But such images of what have become known as Detroit’s “ruin porn” only tell one side of the story. The arts give a broader picture of the full, continuing life of the city, and they may play an increasing role in its future.
This is not to say that the arts will “save Detroit,” as some have suggested. The sociologist Richard Florida, who wrote The Rise of the Creative Class in 2001, has staked much on this messianic and largely unproven claim for rustbelt renewal. Instead, cities work best when the planners get out of the way of artists rather than attempting to use them as tools of gentrification. Basing your urban future on jet-setting bohemians coming to town for a Matthew Barney film shoot is no way to keep the lights on and the water running, or, more to the point, strengthen the local cultural fabric. In his scabrous 2012 book, Detroit City Is the Place to Be, Mark Binelli was onto something when he wrote that “any potential Detroit arts renaissance remains in its earliest phase of development, more about insane real estate opportunities and the romantic vision of a crumbling heartland Berlin—basically, vicarious wish fulfillment by coastal arts types living in long-gentrified cities—than an overarching homegrown aesthetic.” Various reports of the founders of the Williamsburg, Brooklyn arts space Galapagos relocating to Detroit to develop (or flip) unused factory space have only fueled such creative-class speculation.
But Detroit did end up saving the art, starting with grassroots initiatives like the Heidelberg Project, founded in 1986 by the artist Tyree Guyton and his grandfather as a surreal outdoor installation over reclaimed buildings in the city’s McDougall-Hunt neighborhood. The rescuing of DIA was a similar story of renewal that starts with the art itself. In 2014 Detroit’s latter-day Monuments Men won a decisive battle for cultural reconstruction by fighting to reach what was called a “grand bargain” to save the museum. With a collection valued at $8.4 billion, and 2,800 objects worth between $454 and $867 million claimed by the city—including a self-portrait by Van Gogh estimated at $150 million—DIA successfully scrambled to raise hundred of millions of dollars from a combination of private, state, and corporate donors to pay off the creditors. In return, the art stayed on the walls, the museum returned to its pre-1919 status as a private, non-profit institution, and the people of the state demonstrated the value they place in Detroit’s art history.
