Aesthetic City

Arts of Urban Transformation
bangaloreinter...
Taking the once idyllic “garden city” of Bangalore in southern India as its point of departure, Jisha Menon’s book, Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India explores how artists across India engage with urban transformations. The book conveys the affective life of the city through multiple aesthetic projects that express a range of urban feelings, including aspiration, panic, and obsolescence. As developers and policymakers remodel the city through tumultuous construction projects, urban beautification, privatization, and other templated features of “world‑class cities,” urban citizens are also changing-transformed by nostalgia, narcissism, shame, and the spaces where they dwell and work.
Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, Menon delineates the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism, uncovering the interconnectedness of local and global power structures as well as art’s capacity to absorb and critique liberalization’s discontents. She argues that neoliberalism isn’t just an economic, social, and political phenomenon; neoliberalism is also a profoundly aesthetic project.
A talk by Jisha Menon will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience.

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This entire thing was a tedious ideological rant that offered neither a vision for the future nor one for the present.
I'm a little angry at myself for listening to the entire thing, but I don't blame the author. It's obviously my fault for thinking this is something it's not. I'm sure it's a nice book for those who enjoy contemplating the ills of humanity and the irrevocable nature of time or whatever