{"id":13262,"date":"2020-01-17T11:50:21","date_gmt":"2020-01-17T11:50:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=13262"},"modified":"2020-07-21T14:55:24","modified_gmt":"2020-07-21T14:55:24","slug":"sky-couture-jennifer-and-kevin-mccoys-broker-and-the-politics-of-luxury","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=13262","title":{"rendered":"Sky Couture: Jennifer and Kevin McCoy\u2019s BROKER<\/em> and the Politics of Luxury"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Filmed in an apartment on the seventy-seventh floor of Trump World Tower and initially exhibited at Postmasters Gallery, New York, in October and November 2016 (overlapping with the US presidential election), Jennifer and Kevin McCoy\u2019s video BROKER <\/em>examines the pathological underpinnings of \u201csuperluxury\u201d dwelling and its place within the broader culture of capitalist achievement.1<\/a><\/sup> The twenty-six-minute-long looping video centers on the activities of a high-end real estate broker, played by Gillian Chadsey, who appears trapped in a never-ending tragicomedy. Each morning she meticulously prepares for a client walk-through that will invariably leave her in a state of disarray. The first part of her daily ritual involves carefully reciting the sumptuous details of the residence and its furnishings and appliances. At one moment, she enters a trancelike state while various marketing platitudes spill from her lips to the sounds of a vexingly placid score composed by musical artist Lori Scacco. \u201cInfluencing others isn\u2019t luck or magic, it\u2019s a science,\u201d her auto-tuned voice sings. \u201cThere are proven ways to help make you more successful as a marketer or politician.\u201d Throughout the video we are provided glimpses of the apartment from the point of view of cameras embedded throughout the space\u2014components of an elaborate security system. One of them even captures the character of the broker from inside the designer fridge, as she carefully adjusts bottles of \u201cPellegrino sparkling\u201d and \u201cEvian flat.\u201d Nothing in this environment exists separately from the value bestowed upon it by its brand or perceived luxury.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, video clip produced for BROKER<\/em>, 2016 (not included in exhibited version of video). The protagonist of the McCoys\u2019 video is seen in medium close-up, speaking directly to the camera, as a series of real estate photos cycle on a screen behind her head (video provided by Postmasters Gallery).<\/div><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"In<\/a>
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, still from BROKER<\/em>, 2016, video, 28 min. (video provided by Postmasters Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

According to Nina Power, the present-day \u201cparadigmatic image of achievement\u201d is to be found in the \u201cyoung professional woman beam[ing] down at us from real estate billboards.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> And, indeed, the broker in the McCoys\u2019 video, who appears intent on utterly internalizing the speech and gestures of her vocation, is a shining emblem not only of the upwardly mobile workingwoman in today\u2019s society but also of late-capitalist professional achievement more generally. Over the course of the video, however, she will also come to embody the physical and psychological tolls engendered by the ceaseless demands of \u201centrepreneurial subjectivity\u201d\u2014of being<\/em> conceived of as being on the clock.3<\/a><\/sup> Despite the broker\u2019s remarkable conformity to professional ritual, her performance eventually devolves into a series of failed gestures. Ultimately, her position within the video can be thought of as a kind of limit case for the subordination of the body and its affects to the demands of contemporary hyperprofessionalization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The much-anticipated client walk-through she finally performs for the camera is interrupted when she happens upon a number of out-of-place artworks, which crop up as reminders of the messy world beyond the apartment\u2019s secure boundaries. Suddenly, the spell cast by the discourse of achievement is broken. The broker enters a state of bewilderment and ataxia. For a fleeting instant, she seems intent on rebelling against the strictures of her professional life. She takes vengeance on her neatly pressed blazer, tearing its sleeves off through a series of erratic gestures. But her professional existence, it is now confirmed to us, is her only existence. The language of luxury marketing is the only language she speaks. As the day comes to a close, the broker sits on the edge of the bed, spent, somnambulistic, but still droning on about the empowering attributes of the architecture around her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soon, the video returns to the beginning of its cycle. We see the broker\u2019s hands arranging a series of brochures with the Trump Organization logo printed on them. Her voice, which has resumed its professional tone, can be heard over a series of establishing shots of the apartment: \u201cLet us look at the facts of luxury, the incredible resources brought here, deployed here, at this time.\u201d It is an invitation that strikes us as coming from not only the salesperson but also the artists themselves, as though they were beckoning us to contemplate the greater ramifications of the excesses on view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In what follows, I\u2019d like to take up this invitation to \u201clook at the facts of luxury\u201d by examining two interrelated aspects of the McCoys\u2019 work: (1) the architecture<\/em> of the apartment in which it is set (along with the significance of high-end architecture more generally within the video); and (2) the objecthood<\/em> of the luxury consumer products and artworks that appear within the video and that, to some extent, compose its supporting cast of characters. In looking carefully at the aforementioned \u201cincredible resources\u201d arrayed before us and the role they play in structuring the protagonist\u2019s existence, my aim is to offer a provisional account of the type of subjectivity interpellated by the highest reaches of luxury culture. As we will see, it is a subjectivity that is both evacuated of internal ambivalence\u2014of any impulse that might disrupt the seamless logic of marketing and consumption\u2014and, at the same time, one that is susceptible to destabilization from the slightest infiltrations of alterity. This has consequences for how we might conceive of the allegorical value of BROKER<\/em> vis-\u00e0-vis the tense historical and political context in which it was initially exhibited. The fact that the video is set within a Trump-branded building and was on display at the time of the 2016 election tempts us to read the work through a political lens. Yet, far from being a straightforward critique of any single individual or movement, the McCoys\u2019 work provokes circumspect consideration of the political entities it subtly invokes, even as it paints a ghastly picture of the culture of acquisitiveness that has more generally defined our era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Architecture<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

For more than two decades Brooklyn-based couple and artistic collaborators Jennifer and Kevin McCoy have been concerned with the relationship of the body to the spaces it interacts with and inhabits. The duo\u2019s installations, sculptural miniatures, and videos have explored the psychogeography of suburbia, airports, art spaces, shopping malls, luxury resorts, and Silicon Valley tech campuses. In recent years, their work has focused on the alienation and environmental degradation engendered by capitalist development. BROKER <\/em>follows the McCoys\u2019 Eichler Series<\/em> (2014)\u2014a sculptural mash-up of the architecture of various corporate headquarters buildings and Joseph Eichler\u2013designed middle-class houses\u2014in exploring the contemporary imbrications of commerce and dwelling. Among the cultural developments scrutinized in the video is the phenomenon of the contemporary “starchitect.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROKER <\/em>was shot at Trump World Tower, an unremarkable skyscraper located at 845 United Nations Plaza in New York City and designed by Costas Kondylis, one of Trump\u2019s \u201cgo-to\u201d architects. The broker in the McCoys\u2019 video, however, attributes the building to \u201cPritzker Prize\u2013winning architect Christian de Portzamparc.\u201d4<\/a><\/sup> This misattribution can be read as a subtle slight directed not only at de Portzamparc, the more reputable architect (whose buildings, at the very least, tend to evoke a visual fascination that Kondylis\u2019s do not), but also at the validating institutions of an architectural-industrial complex that sees its star figures as transcending the vacuous symbols of status to which they are often reduced in the context of real estate transactions. De Portzamparc is an interesting figure in this regard, as someone who early in his career designed public-housing projects and cultural centers before graduating to the corporate headquarters of Louis Vuitton and condos for those who can afford such luxury brands. Almost nowhere is the decadence of twenty-first-century architecture more visible than in de Portzamparc\u2019s One57, a residential skyscraper that appears more than once within the dramatic skyline visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the apartment in the McCoys\u2019 BROKER<\/em>. Situated on \u201cBillionaires\u2019 Row\u201d on Fifty-Seventh Street in New York City, One57 was briefly the most glamorous building in a neighborhood that, prior to the completion of Hudson Yards, was the city’s reigning poster child for confused civic priorities.5<\/a><\/sup> It would be reductive to posit, on the basis of one example, a stark dichotomy between a supposedly utopian architectural modernism, which sought to change the world around it, and a postmodern architecture subservient only to the machinations of capital. Yet one can hardly ignore how the arc of de Portzamparc\u2019s career reflects architecture\u2019s shifting ambitions in the postwar period. To borrow a remark by Reinhold Martin, whose scholarship has emphasized the haunting of postmodern architecture by the specter of modernism, the work that de Portzamparc is best known for today is of a variety that may well have \u201cfinally succeeded in exorcising Utopia\u2019s ghost.\u201d6<\/a><\/sup> BROKER<\/em> responds to the consequences of this development for contemporary experiences of dwelling.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One57 tower viewed from Seventh Avenue, New York, 2017 (photograph provided by Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository<\/a>; accessed December 18, 2019)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

On the Pritzker website, de Portzamparc describes his creative evolution in terms that are consistent with the antiregulatory rhetoric of personal liberty and choice used to justify the displacement of social-welfare planning by market-driven capitalism.7<\/a><\/sup> \u201cArchitecture seemed to me to be too bureaucratic, and not free enough compared to art,\u201d he remarks, \u201cand the modernistic ideals which I worshiped before, seemed to me unable to reach the richness of real life.\u201d8<\/a><\/sup> In BROKER<\/em>, the liberal individualist ideology underlying such sentiments is reflected in the on-screen descriptions of the dwelling space: \u201cHere we can let go of the old idea of politics,\u201d the broker tells us; \u201chere we can move beyond the geometry of institutional limits\u201d and toward an \u201cinfinity of possibility. . . . The use of space empowers relentlessness. Each element propels you toward your greatest moment.\u201d As at least one reviewer of the McCoys\u2019 fall 2016 Postmasters exhibition observed, this language, making reference to a Trump-branded building, also shares something with the anti-institutional rhetoric used by now-president Trump himself on the campaign trail.9<\/a><\/sup> More immediately, it might be compared to the \u201ctruthful hyperbole\u201d that Trump has used to market his high-end residences for more than three decades. \u201cPeople want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular,\u201d reads a line from Trump: The Art of the Deal<\/em>, a book published when Trump was still principally known as a real estate developer. In Trump\u2019s words, the secret to success is simple: \u201cplay to people\u2019s fantasies.\u201d10<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Trump Tower, Las Vegas (photograph provided by Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository<\/a>; accessed December 18, 2019)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Architecturally, Trump\u2019s strategy of playing to fantasy has translated into a development portfolio that is so lacking in any governing aesthetic vision that Ian Volner has described it as \u201ca horrifying asymptote or lacuna in the middle of capital.\u201d Yet, as Volner seems to begrudgingly acknowledge, it is those Trump Organization buildings that are defined by what he terms their \u201cgold everywhereness\u201d\u2014the excessive incorporation of showy, polished reflective materials\u2014that have had the greatest purchase on the popular imagination.11<\/a><\/sup> They have certainly captured the sordid fascination of Trump\u2019s critics. Associating the \u201cstreaky shiny marble and drippings of fine piss-yellow gold\u201d that adorn numerous Trump-branded buildings with their owner\u2019s sexual proclivities, writer Sam Kriss offers a memorable vision of the president as a urine-fetishizing neurotic.12<\/a><\/sup> Artist Liam Gillick rejects facile invocations of \u201cdictator chic\u201d in his own brief but exacting excursus on Trump tower, but the quote from J. G. Ballard\u2019s High-Rise<\/em> (1975) with which he concludes his text affirms the relationship between obscene fantasy and the surplus of logo-emblazoned glass and brass he takes pains to describe: \u201cSecure within the shell of the high-rise, like passengers on board an automatically-piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the darkest corners they could find.\u201d13<\/a><\/sup> Perhaps it is notable, then, that in the stark spatiality of the apartment in the McCoys\u2019 video, and even in the broker\u2019s hyperbolic descriptions of the residence as offering an \u201cinfinity of possibility,\u201d one encounters something altogether more aseptic. It is not just that the more vulgar trappings of Trumpian glitz are nowhere in sight. It is that the sense of outrageous deviance, of \u201cpure unrestrained and unfiltered id,\u201d that has come to be associated with Trump feels absent or muffled.14<\/a><\/sup> The droning tone of the broker\u2019s voice, in this segment of the video, contributes to the sense that the vision of excess on display here is one that has been drained of vitality, leaving only a coldly abstract or mathematical idea of limitlessness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Michael Sorkin has remarked on the similarities between Trump\u2019s and Hugh Hefner\u2019s relationships to women, architecture, and \u201cleisure-oriented consumption,\u201d but the Playboy Penthouse this is not.15<\/a><\/sup> The latter, in Paul B. Preciado\u2019s account, was \u201cdesigned to endlessly convert work into leisure.\u201d16<\/a><\/sup> An office-like space that could seamlessly shape-shift into the ultimate seduction pad, it offered its (white, male, heterosexual) owner a transgressive reprieve from \u201chis suburban house and his lawn.\u201d17<\/a><\/sup> In BROKER<\/em>, by contrast, the notion of leisure has been entirely subsumed by work. The apartment, as it is presented to us, is geared not toward allowing its inhabitants to transition out of their business attire whenever the moment strikes but rather toward perpetually \u201cempowering\u201d and \u201cpropel[ing]\u201d them to the sorts of abstract heights that are only evoked with a straight face in corporate managerial contexts. The only person who can be said to inhabit the apartment, and who thus serves as a kind of surrogate for its would-be owner, is the broker herself\u2014and her life is the very antithesis of leisurely. In the appointments schedule on her tablet, which we glimpse at one point, the item \u201crelax\u201d is categorized as \u201cwork,\u201d while her aforementioned \u201crecitation\u201d of marketing jargon is listed as a \u201cpersonal activity.\u201d In both instances there is the suggestion of a collapse between personal and professional life that is central to the video\u2019s account of contemporary subjectivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the McCoys\u2019 video, the broker\u2019s grandiloquent architectural-theoretical excursus culminates with an assertion that the apartment is indeed \u201cnot a respite,\u201d in the sense traditionally associated with home, but is rather \u201cthe center of the vortex.\u201d Which vortex, precisely? And what might this have to do with the idea of limitlessness described above? One answer lies in the broker\u2019s references to the \u201cever-shifting skyline,\u201d which affirm the old real estate adage \u201clocation, location, location\u201d in a manifold way. Critics like Herbert Muschamp and Fabrizio Gallanti have noted that Trump\u2019s buildings are often less perceivable as architecture than they are as signifiers of wealth and achievement.18<\/a><\/sup> In the present context, the relatively unremarkable architectural styling can be understood in terms of architecture\u2019s subversion to the function of conferring a sense of lofty stature and voyeuristic supremacy.19<\/a><\/sup> Perhaps even more than the apartment\u2019s architectural details, it is its view of the city around it and its proximity to the heavens that the broker emphasizes. At one point in the video the broker describes the apartment as a \u201cskybox\u201d; at another point it is \u201csky couture.\u201d Would-be occupants are given an unobstructed view of a city that, although teeming, has already been tamed, reduced to an image\u2014a snow-globe metropolis\u2014by virtue of the \u201ctotalizing\u201d function Michel de Certeau, reflecting on a trip to the top of the World Trade Center, associates with the act of beholding from on high.20<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps more vitally, what the apartment would seem to offer its inhabitants on the basis of this voyeurism is a sense of emplacement within the very heart of the process of capitalist accumulation itself. After all, in the age of what Samuel Stein terms \u201cthe real estate state,\u201d the gargantuan forest of luxury buildings that continue to proliferate in Midtown Manhattan at a dizzying rate\u2014and in seemingly direct correlation to the city\u2019s homeless population\u2014is nothing if not a concrete embodiment of the prevailing global economic system.21<\/a><\/sup> If leisure is for losers, and sexual seduction a drain on productivity, at least there is pleasure to be had in watching the most powerful economy in history whirl around you. This, then, is one version of what it means to live at the \u201ccenter of the vortex,\u201d to feel an \u201cinfinity of possibility\u201d all around you. Freedom, as it is posited here, is less a matter of exploring the \u201cdarkest corners\u201d of one\u2019s imagination, as per the characters in Ballard\u2019s novel. Indeed, imagination appears to have taken a back seat to the Icarian experience, returning to de Certeau, of \u201clooking down like a god\u201d\u2014and not merely as a tourist fascinated with the sudden legibility of the urban fabric below but as a stakeholder in the great pageant of capital accretion itself. In the culture of acquisitiveness explored in the McCoys\u2019 video, no possession enchants more than this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in actuality, who else, other than the broker, are the breathless beholders and observed observers of this spectacle of accumulation that so completely perverts the relationship between architecture and inhabitation, between building and dwelling? One answer may be nobody. Many of the apartments in Trump\u2019s buildings are the property of investors who never intended to dwell in them. As Volner has written, \u201cEmptiness is the leitmotif of the Trump Organization\u2019s portfolio, and it is what makes all its buildings so horrible, so chilling, in a way that has little to do with their architecture.\u201d22<\/a><\/sup> Of course, a similar sense of vacuity\u2014in all senses of the term\u2014could be ascribed to the buildings of any number of luxury development companies operating in cities around the globe. And here it is worth considering Stein\u2019s assertion that the Trump family, throughout most of its history, has been little more than a \u201cloud[er]\u201d and more \u201cvulgar version of the completely normal capitalist developer.\u201d Indeed, the bizarre unevenness of the Trump Organization\u2019s projects, which Volner views as an asymptotic outlier, can just as easily be described as a particularly loud or visible symptom of the greater neoliberalization of urban planning: the process whereby city governments have increasingly collaborated with private developers eager to profit in every crassly speculative way\u2014and often at the expense of aesthetic and civic considerations alike\u2014off of deindustrializing zones and neighborhoods slated for so-called renewal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not to say that the Trump brand, particularly post-2016, doesn\u2019t exude its own troubling connotations. But as Rachel Weber reminds us, Trump\u2019s mode of operating as a developer \u201cshows professional practices common to the development industry\u201d as a whole\u2014practices, that are, in turn, \u201cnot situated outside of the system of financial valuation and production [but] are, in fact, constitutive of it.\u201d23<\/a><\/sup> Likewise, if there\u2019s something chilling about Trump\u2019s empty apartment buildings, it is the manner in which they exemplify broader trends within urban speculation. As Fredric Jameson suggests, one of the effects of development in the age of financialization is the encroaching sense that our cities have become so antithetical to human dwelling that even the ghostly traces of what such an activity might have at one time meant are being expunged. \u201cUrban renewal,\u201d he writes, \u201cseems everywhere in the process of sanitizing the ancient corridors and bedrooms to which alone a ghost might cling.\u201d24<\/a><\/sup> The description is apt in light of the apartment in BROKER<\/em>, even though, as we will see, there is a ghostliness that refuses to be exorcized in the McCoys\u2019 video, just as there is in Jameson\u2019s appraisal of postmodern experiences of dwelling. For now, let us simply note that the would-be exorcists in question are enmeshed in a system and ideology that, as Stein takes pains to articulate, transcends political affiliation and certainly extends far beyond the network of nefarious dictators, media moguls, right wing lobbyists, and third-rate hucksters with whom Trump tends to be associated. Here, another answer to the question above\u2014the question of who is the intended inhabitant of the apartment in BROKER<\/em>\u2014can be ventured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A long list of unsavory swindlers now iconic in current-event parlance, from \u201cRussian mobsters\u201d to Paul Manafort, have owned real estate in Trump\u2019s buildings, but the only potential clients we catch sight of in the video\u2014displayed momentarily on the screen of another tablet\u2014are conspicuously of another variety. Hailing from the racially homogenous, Democratic-leaning town of Larchmont, in Westchester County, New York, the \u201cMcClintocks\u201d (as their name seems almost to affirm) come off as just the sort of cookie-cutter, high-achieving white suburban \u201cmoderates\u201d that largely composed the target electorate of Trump\u2019s opponent<\/em> in the 2016 presidential election. The brief glimpse we are given of their client profile does two things. First, it reminds us of the incessant suburbanization of New York and other large cities\u2014the implantation into urban contexts of what Sarah Schulman calls \u201cthe values of the gated community.\u201d25<\/a><\/sup> Second, it helps us to understand the video as gesturing not only toward Trump and his ilk in its representation of the paradigm of dwelling and achievement we have been discussing but also\u2014insofar as the \u201cMcClintocks\u201d can be taken as representative of an entire demographic\u2014toward the liberal, rule-of-law-defending beneficiaries of American professional-class meritocracy. Stein observes that the New York City government has long operated under a \u201cbipartisan consensus\u201d with respect to the engineered inequality and forced displacement (at a rate of one hundred thousand people per year) of its citizens through inherently racist urban policies.26<\/a><\/sup> In this regard Trump\u2019s vile white supremacy is no less connected to the city and industry in which he built his business empire than it is to the rural swaths of \u201cdeplorable\u201d country that, one suspects, he had hardly spent much time in prior to his run for president. As BROKER<\/em> appears to subtly register, the historical unity of the ruling classes is realized in real estate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, still from BROKER<\/em>, 2016, video, 28 min. (video provided by Postmasters Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"The
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, still from BROKER<\/em>, 2016, video, 28 min. (video provided by Postmasters Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Two decades into the twenty-first century, the hypnotic power exerted by the vortex of capital\u2014over ethnonationalists and liberals alike\u2014may seem utterly mundane. It is, however, something that Jameson could still ponder with some befuddlement in his seminal 1991 book on postmodernism, which\u2014it bears mentioning\u2014in no small part grew out of his contemplation of the aesthetic-architectural regime within which Trump\u2019s first signature projects took shape.27<\/a><\/sup> Stricken by the market-fundamentalist frenzy that was just hitting its stride in the mid-1980s, Jameson remarked on how \u201castonishing\u201d it is that \u201cthe dreariness of business and private property, the dustiness of entrepreneurship . . . investment banking and other such transactions\u201d\u2014we might add real estate<\/em> speculation<\/em>\u2014\u201c(after the close of the heroic, or robber baron, stage of business) should in our time have proved to be so sexy<\/em>.\u201d28<\/a><\/sup> Today, it is clearer that we are once again living in a \u201cheroic, or robber baron\u201d era of business (who are Jeff Bezos and the Walton family if not modern-day Fricks and Carnegies?), and as Jameson was quick to realize, the full-scale financialization of the economy has only solidified the hold of the market on the popular imagination.29<\/a><\/sup> But there are other factors involved in present-day capitalism\u2019s powerful allure, factors compelling us to redirect our gaze to the interior attributes of the apartment in BROKER<\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Objecthood<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Much of the action in BROKER<\/em> involves the protagonist describing the luxurious things around her. We hear about \u201cwhite Caesarstone\u201d countertops and the faucets, which are \u201ccustom-designed\u201d with \u201cvery bespoke detailing\u201d and modeled after \u201ca vintage coffee machine.\u201d Moving through the apartment we see modern furniture, decorative vases, and a perfectly polished chrome teapot. In one corner of the room is a Robert Mapplethorpe monograph, an object about objects. On the coffee table lies a copy of the four-hundred-page volume The World in Vogue: People, Parties, Places<\/em>, in case there was any confusion about the global culture of luxury into which we have entered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This rarified vision of dwelling is understood to be all the more alluring by virtue of its advanced technological features\u2014from the appliances, which are \u201cof the highest grade,\u201d to the aforementioned surveillance system and other \u201csmart\u201d devices allowing the resident to precisely calibrate their living environment to their needs. Jameson suggests that the \u201ctechnological bonus of pleasure\u201d afforded by the new consumer gadgets that began to flood the markets at an unprecedented rate (around the same time that \u201cthe market\u201d itself took on a newfound fascination) is of such a nature as to necessitate a new category of consumption. He calls this new form of consumer enjoyment \u201cthe consumption of the very process of consumption itself\u201d (a thing familiar to anyone who has gazed at a screen just to admire its picture quality), and he posits it as integral to the success of consumer capitalism.30<\/a><\/sup> Arguably this type of consumption is not unique to new technological products. But it is hard to deny that advanced consumer technology today serves as the primary apparatus through which capitalism insinuates itself into fantasy\u2014its mesmeric, seemingly self-validating \u201cmiracles\u201d encouraging what Jameson describes as a euphoric \u201csurrender of human freedom to a now lavish invisible hand.\u201d31<\/a><\/sup> In our contemporary moment this is exemplified by what Jonathan Crary describes as the eclipse, by the \u201cattention economy,\u201d of what was \u201conce called the everyday.\u201d32<\/a><\/sup> Increasingly, there is hardly a moment in which existence is not subject to technological capture and, therewith, forces of monetization that grow more insidious all the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such is the condition of domestic life heralded by the \u201cInternet of Things,\u201d which promises to transform the entirety of inhabited space into a digitally networked system. In the quasi-futuristic world of BROKER <\/em>we are provided a glimpse of this new form of domesticity. As the video\u2019s protagonist tells us, the apartment\u2019s luxury-brand appliances (\u201cViking,\u201d \u201cMiele,\u201d \u201cLa Cornue\u201d) are \u201call completely connected to the network, to your mobile devices, to you<\/em>.\u201d In such a context, architecture\u2014already subject, in the age of the contemporary starchitect, to the principle of \u201cbrands over products\u201d and subverted to the value bestowed upon it by the real estate market\u2014need only facilitate access to various sites of consumer ritual, defined increasingly by the second-level enjoyment of consuming \u201cconsumption itself.\u201d The homeowner hardly needs to look out the window, for here\u2014encircled by miraculous objects, propelled by each element toward their \u201cgreatest moment\u201d\u2014they are already at the center of the vortex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"The<\/a>
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, still from BROKER<\/em>, 2016, video, 28 min. (video provided by Postmasters Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTo live inside<\/em> fantasy\u201d was the project Rem Koolhaas associated with Manhattanism more than four decades ago.33<\/a><\/sup> Whether or not there was ever any utopian thrust to this project, what BROKER<\/em> helps us to see is both the mesmeric power and the frightening vacuity of its contemporary manifestations. The video\u2019s achievement lies in part in its allowing us to observe askance\u2014to see the performative dimension within\u2014the spectacle that is superluxury dwelling. There is a creeping unease produced by the McCoys\u2019 video that is similar to that produced by the picture-perfect dwellings and automaton-like inhabitants of the fictional town in the 1972 novel The Stepford Wives<\/em>. This owes as much to BROKER<\/em>\u2019s cinematic language as to Chadsey\u2019s dead-eyed smile and tranquil delivery. Especially unsettling is the work\u2019s initial transition from depictions of its protagonist carrying out her drab professional duties to the longer of the video\u2019s two musical numbers\u2014a segment in which the broker addresses the camera directly as the unearthly synth chords of Scacco\u2019s soundtrack swell and a dolly zoom further disorients our senses. In the figure of the hypnotized salesperson\/hypnotist we glimpse a terrifying closure of the subject within its system of prestige-bestowing objects. When the interlude concludes, and the broker returns to tidying up the apartment, it is difficult to see the space in the same way. One senses a maleficence lurking beneath the \u201cherringbone parquet floors.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROKER<\/em> is obviously not the sort of materialist account of the production and global circulation of commodities that one finds in the work of artists as different in their approaches as Allan Sekula and Amie Siegel. Quasi-fictional rather than documentary, its focus is not directly on the social forces underlying the availability of the luxury goods it spotlights but on the discourses and affects surrounding their consumption. One can nevertheless assert that the objects in the McCoys\u2019 video, like the art and objects of empire that W. J. T. Mitchell has analyzed, represent \u201call the crafts, skills, and technologies that make imperialism possible\u201d; that they are, indeed, a kind of \u201csynecdoche for . . . the whole Borgesian archive of empire,\u201d and thus for the very idea of empire itself. To wit: \u201cthe total domination of material things and people, linked (potentially) with totalitarianism, with \u2018absolute dominion,\u2019 the utopian unification of the human species and the world it inhabits; or the dystopian spectacle of total domination, the oppression and suffering of vast populations, the reduction of human life to a \u2018bare life\u2019 for the great masses of people.\u201d34<\/a><\/sup> Insofar as this is registered in the video, it is, once again, by way of the broker\u2019s sales pitch. With rehearsed delectation, she offers the would-be owner and heavenly sovereign a vision of the \u201cunification\u201d of material belongings and subjectivity, as well as of technology-abetted control or \u201cdominion\u201d that is no less than imperial. It furthermore cannot be forgotten\u2014particularly considering the immediate urban geography referenced in BROKER<\/em>\u2014that this promise of empowered \u201crelentlessness,\u201d like the larger project of empire of which it is a part, is bound up with vast immiseration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"The<\/a>
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, still from BROKER<\/em>, 2016, video, 28 min. (video provided by Postmasters Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"A<\/a>
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, still from BROKER<\/em>, 2016, video, 28 min. (video provided by Postmasters Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Of course, in the age of Trump, any discussion of the objects of empire is likely to conjure such blatantly exploitative excesses as big-game trophies or blood diamonds, the respectively banned hunting and sales of which the president has taken measures to once again allow. It might also provoke consideration of the imperialist fantasies suggested by the oversize period furniture that decorates the president\u2019s own Trump Tower apartment.35<\/a><\/sup> As we already know, however, this is not that kind of space. Perhaps the closest we get to any overtly scandalous sense of excess is the Robert Mapplethorpe book, and its contents remain safely stored away between its book covers. Moreover, the very fact that it appears in the apartment should indicate to us, once again, that we are within a space outfitted to appeal less to the sordid Trumpian imagination than to the globe-trotting, Vogue<\/em>-reading liberal: the sort of people who know that the spoils of empire are meant to be tastefully concealed beneath a patina of decency, the aegis of global foundations, diplomacy, philanthropic efforts, and things of that nature.36<\/a><\/sup> The sort of people, for instance, who might organize to have Trump\u2019s name removed from the face of their apartment complex, as the tenants of New York\u2019s West Side Highway\u2013facing Trump Place did in the wake of the presidential election, and then celebrate the successful mitigation of their shame as an \u201cempowering act of protest,\u201d while continuing, quite shamelessly, to talk up the building\u2019s \u201cimpeccable\u201d services.37<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the news item just cited, which was circulated giddily on liberal social media in the wake of Trump\u2019s election, one catches a whiff of the \u201chorrifying hypocrisy\u201d Georges Bataille associated with the ruling class of his own era for presuming that it might be \u201ccapable of acceptably<\/em> dominating the poorer classes,\u201d so long as it managed to exhibit restraint or, in his phrasing, \u201cmaintain sterility\u201d with respect to its visible excesses.38<\/a><\/sup> What BROKER<\/em> affirms is that, in the world of superluxury, even the most sterile expenditures come at a cost that is more than monetary. The \u201csky couture\u201d before us may be tasteful enough in its unobtrusiveness, but the subjectivity it indexes and interpellates is troubling precisely for the manner in which it equates morals with good taste, the right<\/em> sort of expensive coffee-table book, designer brand, or luxurious apartment complex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here it is worth recalling Hal Foster\u2019s essay \u201cDesign and Crime,\u201d an early twenty-first-century update of Adolf Loos\u2019s \u201cOrnament and Crime.\u201d As Foster argues, the \u201cworld of total design\u201d birthed at the turn of the nineteenth century and reenvisioned according to modernist principles has, in actuality, only reached its zenith \u201cin our own pan-capitalist present.\u201d Today, everything from domestic interiors to the drugs people take to the DNA they pass on to their children bears a \u201cdesigner\u201d label. And, as Foster observes, it is often the name on the product as much as the thing itself that the consumer of luxury goods desires and identifies with, performing \u201ca self-interpellation of \u2018hey, that\u2019s me\u2019\u201d each time they catch sight of their<\/em> brand.39<\/a><\/sup> The effect of all this increasingly abstracted objecthood on subjectivity, according to Foster, is \u201cthe production of a new kind of narcissism, one that is all image and no interiority\u2014an apotheosis of the subject that is also its potential disappearance.\u201d40<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is just such an apotheosis that the protagonist in BROKER<\/em> embodies, not only by virtue of the luxury brand names and marketing platitudes that make up the extent of her vocabulary but also through her very gestures, which have been purged of all but the faintest traces of spontaneity. The staged apartment, for its part, shows no signs of living inhabitants. Walter Benjamin\u2019s scattered remarks on the birth of interior space and bourgeois dwelling feel appropriate in theorizing the subjectivity evinced here. \u201cTo live means to leave traces,\u201d writes Benjamin.41<\/a><\/sup> While the \u201csoulless luxuriance\u201d of the apartments that figure in nineteenth-century detective fiction may have been \u201ctrue comfort only in the presence of a dead body,\u201d they were nevertheless filled with objects designed, so long as their doomed occupants were alive, to emphasize their living<\/em> movements.42<\/a><\/sup> Indeed, for Benjamin, it was precisely through the \u201cabundance of covers and protectors, liners and cases,\u201d on which the \u201ctraces of objects of everyday use\u201d can be observed, that the forensic imagination of Edgar Allan Poe and his successors came into being.43<\/a><\/sup> In BROKER<\/em> this dialectic of life and death is sublated into the protagonist\u2019s day-to-day existence, which is lifeless in a strict Benjaminian sense. When the broker is not subordinating her speech to the \u201csoulless luxuriance\u201d around her she is busy maintaining the pristine presentability of the space, which means perpetually erasing all traces she has left within it. Over the course of the video we see her polishing the mirror in the bathroom, arranging pillows on the couch, and picking fuzz from the carpet. This obsessive enactment of household duties traditionally associated with women\u2019s work, which parallels the broker\u2019s meticulous self-maintenance and maquillage, can be understood as registering the asymmetric pressures placed on professional women, even within a cultural context in which, to quote Nina Power, \u201call work has become women\u2019s work, even that of men.\u201d44<\/a><\/sup> At the same time, her efforts to keep every designer-branded surface of the apartment in pristine, merchandisable condition contributes to the impression that this is an interior space suitable for a subject that\u2014irrespective of gender and its masquerades\u2014is \u201call image and no interiority.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, video clip produced for BROKER<\/em>, 2016 (not included in exhibited version of video). The broker appears in the apartment bathroom and carefully polishes the glass mirror (video provided by Postmasters Gallery).<\/div><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Importantly for the McCoys\u2019 commentary on our cultural moment, this also means that this interior space is one that is unsuitable for art\u2014at least for any art not immediately reducible to its value as a luxury item (or concealable within the pages of a coffee-table book). Reflecting on the emergence of \u201cthing theory\u201d and the broader interest in material culture that took hold at the start of the twenty-first century, Mitchell observes that \u201cobjecthood . . . seems to have decisively triumphed over what [Michael] Fried understood to be art.\u201d45<\/a><\/sup> In the present context, that triumph must be understood as coextensive with the triumph of the particular object that is the commodity. In its extreme form, such a triumph implies the elimination of the autonomous artwork: the reduction of aesthetic value to market value, or, at best, to design value\u2014to a given work\u2019s complementary capacity within a preconceived scheme or system. As a work in which luxury consumer products vie for the leading role, BROKER<\/em> helps us to visualize this \u201ctotal\u201d order of commodity-things. But it also places in question this order\u2019s totalizing potential. As the work crescendos, we see that the broker\u2019s efforts to maintain the space in its hermetic perfection are unsustainable. When a series of unplaceable pictorial artworks appear within the apartment, seemingly out of nowhere, the pristine world before us begins to crumble. What the McCoys\u2019 video therefore appears to imply is that the full emergence of commodification ironically conditions the return of art as a potentially destabilizing force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here we can refer to Nicholas Brown\u2019s work on the \u201creal subsumption\u201d of art under capital. Brown argues that under present-day neoliberalism, \u201cthe assertion of [artistic] autonomy\u201d in relation to the culture industry\u2014which was essential to modernism but antithetical to postmodernist pastiche\u2014\u201cbecomes vital once again.\u201d Moreover, whereas modernism\u2019s relation to the market can be understood, retrospectively, as \u201cnothing other than a deeper commitment to classical political liberalism,\u201d manifest through the establishment of a \u201crestricted field\u201d of autonomous expression within the broader cultural sphere, art nowadays faces its potential commodification\u2014insofar as it faces it at all\u2014in a more directly antagonistic manner. \u201cAutonomy today,\u201d writes Brown, \u201cis locked in a life or death struggle with the market.\u201d The vitality of the autonomous work of art depends upon its ability not only to cut against the gravitational pull of the market or surreptitiously repurpose popular cultural forms but also to mediate its relationship to the wider political economy in such a way as to produce\u2014at the very least\u2014a \u201cminimal\u201d counterpolitics.46<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is effectively the stage onto which the art object enters in BROKER<\/em>\u2014only we have to envision here a market that has already claimed victory in a way that is at once more decisive (if possible) than in our own era and, by virtue of this decisiveness, Pyrrhic. For the world of BROKER<\/em> would seem to be one in which any expression of the semiautonomy of the artwork, its merest resistance to prevailing structures of codification, is a threat to the coherence of the system as a whole. The artworks that appear, unexpectedly, within the more private recesses of the apartment, as though born into being through a chink in the repressive armor of luxury culture, are only minimally disturbing. (In the bathroom is a painting of a man with blood pouring from his head; in the laundry closet is a work depicting a face smeared with a pinkish substance.47<\/a><\/sup>) But they resist easy assimilation into the protagonist\u2019s lexicon of \u201cvery bespoke\u201d attributes and thus register less as objects than as \u201cthings\u201d\u2014sources of destabilizing ambivalence.48<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is essential here is not so much the nature of the objects themselves, which hardly fit into the categories of \u201cpositive historicism\u201d or \u201caestheticization of genre\u201d that Brown offers as worthily autonomous challengers to the \u201cheteronomy\u201d of the market. It is rather the way in which these objects\u2014embedded in a work that is, indeed, \u201ca theory of itself\u201d in the sense Brown argues is necessitated under present conditions\u2014are made to figure an unassimilable remainder within an otherwise totalizing system. Their uncanny emergence suggests that for all the seeming implausibility of autonomy in our market-dominated era, it is, rather, as Brown asserts, \u201cthe claim to universal heteronomy that is implausible.\u201d49<\/a><\/sup> In this sense, for all of the work\u2019s apparent pessimism regarding the ever-escalating obsession with material accumulation and the reduction of the everyday to consumer ritual, BROKER<\/em> invests the work of art with an estimable power to interrupt the dominant paradigms of desire and consumption, staking a claim to its own autonomy in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, the notion that there is an unassimilable remainder to the operations of the market is reflected in the gestures of the broker herself. The appearance, in the apartment, of the unplaceable art-object-Thing disarticulates not only the system of objects the protagonist has taken such care to describe but, with it, the subjectivity that has been molded by that system.50<\/a><\/sup> From the moment the video\u2019s protagonist catches sight of the artworks, her carefully rehearsed professional routine is thrown into disarray. She undergoes the bout of bewilderment, proprioceptive breakdown, and fleeting refusal that I described at the start of this essay. In this moment, she bears testament to the minimal difference that prevails between her being and the vision of total subjectivization she had earlier embodied. How, finally, are we to understand this moment of disturbance vis-\u00e0-vis the immediate political context surrounding the McCoys\u2019 video?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"The<\/a>
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, still from BROKER<\/em>, 2016, video 28 min. (video provided by Postmasters Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"The<\/a>
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, still from BROKER<\/em>, 2016, video, 28 min. (video provided by Postmasters Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"In<\/a>
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, still from BROKER<\/em>, 2016, video, 28 min. (video provided by Postmasters Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Breakdown<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

For those who viewed BROKER<\/em> at Postmasters Gallery in the aftermath of the 2016 election, when protestors were gathering in front of Trump Tower on a nightly basis, the video might have seemed to possess an unsettling prescience. In its portrayal of a hypersurveilled, consummate professional woman who, despite her exhaustive preparation, is undone at the pivotal moment, the work anticipates what is\u2014along with 9\/11 and the 2008 market crash\u2014the most significant glitch in the institutional logic of twenty-first-century US history. The pressed jacket worn, and later torn, by the protagonist in BROKER<\/em> already rhymes unavoidably (if unintentionally) with the all-white suit worn by Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention in a purported nod to the women\u2019s movement. Roughly two weeks after the video\u2019s premiere, the breakdown it depicts would be echoed by Clinton\u2019s bewildering downfall. In the lead-up to the election, the former First Lady, senator, and secretary of state, whose prior life had seemed nothing if not a long rehearsal for the role of president, would find herself, like the broker, lost in a Trumpian funhouse, turned about in a vertiginous echo chamber of empty slogans and \u201ctruthfully hyperbolic\u201d sentiments. If BROKER<\/em> is foremost a response to the culture of professional achievement in general, it nevertheless lends itself, once again, to considerations of the particular place of women\u2019s labor within a prejudicial social sphere that still privileges male dominance. In this regard, the work might be read in relation to the labyrinth of culturally ingrained antagonisms and expectations that Clinton had to negotiate in her efforts to upend the most patriarchal of institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the preceding analysis has already demonstrated, however, the video\u2019s implicit criticisms of the society it references are more complex than they might initially appear. First of all, we cannot forget that the spatial physiognomy of the apartment in the video is decidedly un-Trumpian, at least in the obviously vulgar sense. Rather, it reflects the taste of the \u201cMcClintock\u201d liberals among whom, it is often forgotten, Trump himself has spent much of his life hobnobbing. Second, insofar as BROKER<\/em> foregrounds the technocratic mindset, with its smug credentialism and devotion to supposedly \u201cscientific\u201d strategies for success, the video\u2019s commentary by no means limits itself to the world of commercial achievement. It may also be extended to professional political culture and perhaps particularly to the American liberal establishment, with its unshakable faith in focus groups and poll testing and its seeming inability to navigate outside a set of predetermined gestures\u2014to so much as entertain a realm of possibility beyond the bounds of its narrowly concessionary political imperatives. In this sense, the automaton-like protagonist in BROKER<\/em>, whose hermetically interpellated existence is ruptured by the merest glimpse of alterity, anticipates the insight, now voiced even by standard-bearers within the Democratic Party, that Donald Trump did not win the presidency so much as Democrats lost it. Faced with a series of unforeseen swerves necessitated not only by the rise of the alt-right but also by a newly energized left, the Democratic Party\u2019s well-greased political machine ran off its rails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such parallels may be compelling in their own right. In the end, however, BROKER<\/em> is more than simply an effective allegory for the 2016 election. It is a searing indictment of neoliberal culture as a whole: its obsession with wealth and achievement and its production of a form of subjectivity reduced to near-total consumer identification. Lauren Berlant has given us the marvelously succinct phrase \u201ccruel optimism\u201d to describe the self-defeating attachments to fantasies of \u201cthe good life\u201d we continue to nurture under capitalism in spite of ourselves. But in the superluxury imaginary\u2014the phantasmagoric realm of overexcess, of the excess of excess<\/em>\u2014we encounter a voraciousness and an object of desire for which terms like \u201ccruel optimism\u201d and \u201cgood-life fantasy\u201d seem all too kind. In one of the final images we see before the McCoys\u2019 video loops over again, the broker is shown lapping up a ring of moisture on the coffee table from which she has just lifted a glass of brand-name water, poured for her prospective client. It is as though by imbibing this tiny excess share of transactional exchange she might absorb within her the molecules of luxury itself. Here the catchword \u201cthirsty\u201d\u2014as in \u201cThe 13 Thirstiest People of 2017,\u201d a Fast Company<\/em> article that, unsurprisingly, featured Donald Trump at the top of its list\u2014seems the only appropriate term. The culture of acquisitiveness envisioned in BROKER<\/em> is one that appears hell-bent on drinking the oceans dry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What the work nevertheless affirms, if it can be said to possess an affirmative dimension, is that ambivalence remains threaded throughout the damaged and costly psychology it spatializes with such scrutiny. The fantasy of immaculate plenitude is threatened by internal forces that grow stronger from the energy expended to keep them at bay. As in any aseptic environment, the prevailing order of productivity grows vulnerable by virtue of its own excessive decontamination. As much as BROKER<\/em> models the persistent inculcation of a purely transactional mode of human conduct that is a threat to the human as such, it is also a work about the implausibility of totalization and the uncanny returns produced by capitalist domination. In this sense, the McCoys\u2019 video does more than allegorize the undoing of a Democratic Party whose faith in nineties-era political wisdom blinded it to the seething disaffection of segments of the electorate that have failed to benefit under the prevailing political economy. The work also anticipates larger-scale disruptions in the global order that have already expressed themselves with particular force on the European continent and that, as of this writing, are rocking city streets from Beirut to Santiago. It remains to be seen whether these disruptions will result in genuinely new political alignments, or whether the crisis will pass and the day will begin again, as it finally does in BROKER<\/em>, with a lifeless smile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

David Markus <\/strong>is an interdisciplinary writer and educator. His work focuses on representations of dwelling and domesticity in late-capitalist contexts, social practices in contemporary art, and the conflict between intimacy and artistic ambition in twentieth-century literature, art, and film. His articles and reviews have appeared in publications such as Art in America<\/em>, Frieze<\/em>, Art Journal<\/em>, Art Papers<\/em>, and Flash Art<\/em>. He teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/div>
  1. \u201cSuperluxury\u201d is a term Donald Trump has long used to describe the mix of high-end design details and amenities that his residence buildings offer to their wealthy clientele. Trump\u2019s particular vision of superluxury brings together commerce and leisure with exclusive dwelling. The website for Trump Tower, which preceded Trump World Tower by two decades, states the former building was \u201cthe first super-luxury high rise property in New York to include high-end retail shops, office space and residential condominiums.\u201d See \u201cHistory: Trump Tower, New York,\u201d<\/a> Trump Tower website, accessed September 1, 2018. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  2. Power\u2019s argument is that the generalization, within the professional sphere, of not only the precarity but also the affective labor and carefully choreographed self-presentation traditionally associated with \u201cwomen\u2019s work\u201d has meant that work, as such, \u201chas essentially been feminized.\u201d See Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman<\/em> (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009), 21, 22. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  3. This has become a common term for critics concerned with describing life in Western neoliberal contexts. \u201cMore and more,\u201d writes Lauren Berlant, \u201ceven when asleep, one is never closed for business. This is the pressured affectsphere of entrepreneurial subjectivity, the form of life forced to be on the make.\u201d See Berlant, \u201cOn Persistence,\u201d<\/a> Social Text <\/em>121, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 33\u201337. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  4. As David Dunlap observed in his New York Times<\/em> obituary for the architect, Kondylis, who passed away in August 2018, \u201cdid not so much have an aesthetic style as a business formula. He provided developers with efficient, marketable, dependable, comfortable buildings. The designs won few prizes or critical plaudits, but they also caused few headaches for those who financed and built them.\u201d Dunlap, \u201cCostas Kondylis, Go-To Architect in a High-Rise Town, Dies at 78,\u201d<\/a> New York Times<\/em>, August 24, 2018. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  5. Developed by diamond-merchant-turned-developer Gary Barnett, whose company Extell has been accused of a range of unscrupulous practices, the largely uninhabited skyscraper is a giant investment-opportunity-cum-tax-shelter. For a discussion of how buildings like One57 operate as tax shelters for the wealthy, see Kriston Capps, \u201cWhy Billionaires Don\u2019t Pay Property Taxes in New York,\u201d<\/a> CityLab<\/em>, May 11, 2015. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  6. Reinhold Martin and Jonathan Crisman, \u201cConjuring Utopia\u2019s Ghost,\u201d<\/a> Thresholds<\/em> 40 (2012): 14. See also Reinhold Martin, Utopia\u2019s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  7. David Harvey notes that \u201cit has been part of the genius of neoliberal theory to provide a benevolent mask full of wonderful-sounding words like freedom, liberty, choice, and rights, to hide the grim realities of the restoration or reconstitution of naked class power.\u201d Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 119. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  8. Christian de Portzamparc biography<\/a>, Pritzker Architecture Prize website, accessed June 25, 2019. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  9. Mira Dayal, \u201cJennifer and Kevin McCoy: Broker<\/em>,\u201d<\/a> NYAQ\/LXAQ\/SFAQ\/<\/em>, November 21, 2016. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  10. Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz, Trump: The Art of the Deal<\/em> (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987), 58. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  11. \u201cIan Volner on the Architecture of Trump,\u201d<\/a> video, Artforum<\/em>, accessed April 6, 2019. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  12. Sam Kriss, \u201cPissologies,\u201d<\/a> Baffler<\/em>, January 17, 2017. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  13. Liam Gillick, \u201cA Building on Fifth Avenue,\u201d<\/a> e-flux<\/em> 78 (December 2016). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  14. David Martin, \u201cTrump Is Unrestrained and Unfiltered Id,\u201d<\/a> Huffington Post<\/em>, August 17, 2017. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  15. Michael Sorkin, \u201cThe Donald Trump Blueprint,\u201d<\/a> Nation<\/em>, July 26, 2016. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  16. Beatriz (Paul B.) Preciado, Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics<\/em> (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2014), 86. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  17. Ibid. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  18. Herbert Muschamp, \u201cTrump, His Gilded Taste, and Me,\u201d<\/a> New York Times<\/em>, December 19, 1999; Fabrizio Gallanti, \u201cBlinded by Bling: On the Absence of Architecture in Trump World,\u201d<\/a> Interwoven: The Fabric of Things<\/em>, accessed on June 1, 2018. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  19. Voyeuristic supremacy, it would seem, is something near and dear to Trump. Michael Kruse quotes two separate sources describing Trump as someone who was perpetually \u201clooking down\u201d from his perch in Trump Tower. See Michael Kruse, \u201cHow Gotham Gave Us Trump,\u201d<\/a> Politico Magazine<\/em>, July\/August 2017. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  20. Of the experience of viewing Manhattan from the top of the World Trade Center, de Certeau writes how one is transformed into \u201can Icarus flying above. . . . His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance.\u201d See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life: Volume 1<\/em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 92. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  21. Stein notes that \u201cglobal real estate is now worth $217 trillion, thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. It makes up 60 percent of the world\u2019s assets, and the vast majority of that wealth\u2014roughly 75 percent\u2014is in housing.\u201d Samuel Stein, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State<\/em> (London: Verso, 2019), 2. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  22. Ian Volner, \u201cFool\u2019s Gold: The Architecture of Trump,\u201d<\/a> Artforum<\/em>, accessed April 7, 2019. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  23. Rachel Weber, \u201cEdifice Rex: Egos, Assets, and the Financialization of Property Markets,\u201d Avery Review<\/a><\/em> 21<\/a>, January 2017. It is essential to Weber\u2019s argument that her analysis of Trump \u201cshows professional practices common to the development industry.\u201d ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  24. Fredric Jameson, \u201cThe Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation,\u201d New Left Review<\/em> I\/228 (March\/April 1998): 45. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  25. Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination<\/em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 30. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  26. Samuel Stein, \u201cNew York\u2019s Bipartisan Consensus,\u201d in Capital City<\/em>, 79\u2013115. For relocation statistics, see Noah Manskar, \u201cOver 100k NYers Are Forced from Homes Each Year, Research Finds,\u201d<\/a> Patch<\/em>, May 24, 2019. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  27. For an analysis of Trump Tower via Jameson\u2019s Postmodernism<\/em>, see Gillick, \u201cA Building on Fifth Avenue.\u201d ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  28. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 274. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  29. In Jameson\u2019s essay \u201cCulture and Finance Capital,\u201d which proceeds from a reading of Giovanni Arrighi\u2019s The Long Twentieth Century<\/em>, Jameson explicitly poses a series of questions about the hypnotic power of the market in light of the (by that point) hegemonic reign of the economic system bequeathed by the \u201cReagan-Kemp and Thatcher Utopias.\u201d En route to a more elaborate analysis of the abstractions and deterritorializations of finance capital, he also provides an insight that\u2014as he is well aware\u2014is as simple and self-evident as it is unsatisfying: we have returned to \u201cthe most fundamental form of class struggle.\u201d Henceforth, as far as most of society is concerned, political freedom is market freedom. See Fredric Jameson, \u201cCulture and Finance Capital,\u201d Critical Inquiry <\/em>24, no. 1 (Autumn 1997): 247, 246, 247. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  30. Ibid., 275\u201376. This paradigm is captured beautifully in a recent Samsung ad featuring a man whose unblinking eyes stare in amazement at a television broadcast of a football game, despite the fact that \u201che\u2019s more of a golf guy.\u201d See \u201cSamsung QLED TV TV Commercial, \u2018Can\u2019t Look Away,\u2019\u201d<\/a> iSpot.tv, accessed November 11, 2018. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  31. Ibid., 274. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  32. Jonathan Crary, 24\/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep <\/em>(London: Verso, 2013), 75\u201376. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  33. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York<\/em> (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994), 10. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  34. W. J. T. Mitchell, \u201cEmpire and Objecthood,\u201d in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images <\/em>(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 154. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  35. Peter York, \u201cTrump\u2019s Dictator Chic,\u201d<\/a> Politico<\/em>, March\/April 2017. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  36. Research into the purchasing habits of Democrats and Republicans confirms a division in the social signaling privileged by each group. The authors of a recent study suggest that Republicans spend more on luxury products and are more concerned with \u201cvertical\u201d hierarchy than Democrats, whereas the latter tend to privilege \u201chorizontal\u201d uniqueness. See \u201cBetter or Different? How Political Ideology Shapes Preferences for Differentiation in the Social Hierarchy,\u201d<\/a> Journal of Consumer Research<\/em> 45, no. 2 (August 1, 2018): 227\u201350. It is notable, however, and perhaps indicative of the fact that there is less daylight between Trump and his wealthy liberal counterparts than is often pretended, that Vogue <\/em>coffee-table books appear to be a staple of Trump\u2019s own lavish Louis XIV\u2013inspired penthouse. See Ben Ashford, \u201cInside Donald Trump’s $100 Million Penthouse: Gold-Rimmed Cups, a Toy Personalized Mercedes for His 10-Year-Old Son, a $15,000 Book and Some VERY Risqu\u00e9 Statues,\u201d<\/a> Daily Mail<\/em>, November 10, 2016. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  37. Caleb Melby, \u201cNYC\u2019s Trump Place Apartments to Drop Name amid Tenant Outcry,\u201d<\/a> Bloomberg<\/em>, November 15, 2016. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  38. Georges Bataille, \u201cThe Notion of Expenditure,\u201d Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927\u20131939<\/em>, ed., trans. Allan Stoekl, (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1985), 125. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  39. Hal Foster, \u201cDesign and Crime,\u201d Design and Crime<\/em> (and Other Diatribes)<\/em> (London: Verso, 2003), 19\u201320. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  40. Ibid., 25. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  41. Walter Benjamin, \u201cParis, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,\u201d in Reflections<\/em>, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 154, 155. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  42. Walter Benjamin, \u201cOne-Way Street<\/em> (Selection),\u201d in Reflections<\/em>, 65. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  43. Benjamin, \u201cParis, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,\u201d 154, 155. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  44. Power, One Dimensional Woman<\/em>, 22. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  45. Mitchell, \u201cEmpire and Objecthood,\u201d 153. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  46. Nicholas Brown, \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Its Real Subsumption under Capital,\u201d<\/a> Nonsite.org<\/em>, March 13, 2012. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  47. The painting in the bathroom is by Angela Dufresne; the second work is by Geoffrey Chadsey, who happens to be the brother of Gillian Chadsey, the actress playing the broker. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  48. \u201cThings,\u201d as Mitchell states, \u201chave a habit of breaking out of the circuit, shattering the matrix of virtual objects and imaginary objectives.\u201d Mitchell, \u201cEmpire and Objecthood,\u201d 156. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  49. Brown, \u201cWork of Art.\u201d ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  50. For an account of the relationship between subject, object, and thing<\/em>, see Bill Brown, Other Things <\/em>(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 20\u201324. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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