Beauty's Ruin at the End of the World

The fourth chapter begins with the genre of ruin porn—what some commentators call the now-familiar art photographs and documentary images of decline in postindustrial Rust Belt cities such as Detroit—to examine the accusation of aesthetic failure to accommodate political or ethical crisis. Here crisis is doubled; the ruin is the terrible consequence of a historical situation, and its representation is the unnerving collapse of the event of knowledge. The promise to diagnose what is missing or gone wrong, which is necessary to the naming and narration of crisis, is betrayed by a “purely” aesthetic beauty. Here, and in its other iterations as a complaint, the pornographic is a judgment in error and the estrangement of the human from others, from history. But the complaint can help us be more attentive to how we become attached to certain perceptual practices in the appraisal of beauty and its failures.