Ronald McDonald’s arts district Anthony Carfello

Ronald McDonald’s arts district

Words by Anthony Carfello

In May of this year, I joined a group of artists and designers in Aalborg, Denmark, for a discussion about the rebranding of their city from industrial centre to creativity hub. Organised by the f.eks. platform, we talked about how this rebranding had produced so many of the exact things found in any other urban area that has used arts and culture to stimulate an economic boost.

Even as a Californian visiting for the first time, the sanitised street art, factories turned into venues and studios, and name-brand architecture with adjacent condominium construction were all familiar to me as run-of-the-mill markers of newly curated space. It was appropriate then that our conversation took place in a McDonald’s restaurant in the centre of town. Prior to gathering that day, the locals had been in extended dialogue with each other and with municipal representatives about the artwashing that was and had been happening amid what the region’s tourism and hospitality industries frame as the rejuvenation of Aalborg. What is artwashing? Since the term was first popularised by the journalist Feargus O’Sullivan in 2014,1 artwashing has been applied to a number of pre-existing practices that have accelerated with both rampant gentrification and the expansion of the art tourism and luxury real estate markets. Like greenwashing2 and pinkwashing3, artwashing is about using something’s assumed virtues to mask nefariousness – from vacuous murals being plastered on the sides of glistening speculative developments to polluters, profiteers, and the generally anti-democratic using private collections and museum donations to launder their reputations.4 Most commonly, artwashing tactics use the presence of artists and galleries to attract frenzied property investment to previously neglected urban neighbourhoods, a process that has played out in cities internationally. Beginning in 2016, these tactics faced a vital – and largely successful – campaign of community resistance by residents of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles.5 The fight was publicised widely as gallery openings were protested and the gentrifying ventures subsequently

closed. Nevertheless, many willing pawns were simply redeployed to other areas of the city to repeat the script. Other money-magnets are sometimes at work prior to (or in parallel with) artwashing: music venues, clubs, coffeeshops, fancy restaurants, and so on. Regardless, the instruments and products of artwashing, like other components of gentrification, are agonising in their monotony: if it’s not the same whitewall galleries designed by the same boutique architecture practices, it’s the same gut-rehabbed factories turned into studios and co-working spaces, or the same Bilbao-effect art museums by the same fading starchitects. In the context of American cities, where housing is subject to laissez-faire exploitation, rent increases and social cleansing are concurrent with the unaffordable new buildings that follow once the area is dubbed an Arts District. And globally – from Los Angeles to London; Melbourne to Milwaukee – these methods work bottom-up with individual real estate agents and top-down with business consortiums, planners, governments, and tourism bureaus. Either direction results in consumption-centred marketing that sells a carboncopy, imagined artistic lifestyle to those who do not make art. Those who do were already priced out. It’s this overwhelming repetition that brought us to a McDonald’s. In his 1993 book, The McDonaldization of Society, sociologist George Ritzer updated the German theorist Max Weber’s writings on bureaucracy and described how the rationalisation at the core of the business model of the ultimate American enterprise had spread throughout industries and become a key characteristic of the globalised world.6 We poured over a Danish translation of Ritzer’s work while considering the features of the fast-food franchise alongside those of artwashed space. Two key components of McDonaldization are efficiency (food in hand as fast as possible) and calculability (ever-present quantification). Our group had no challenge finding analogous comparisons with the speed in which arts outlets can be established (a gallery and a mural can each appear within less than a week) and the revaluation and reappraisal of property (which is ongoing from the minute a neighbourhood is targeted) – not to mention the tax avoidance benefits that come with museum contributions in the US. Control, from uniforms to computerised systems that instruct human employees, is another of Ritzer’s defining attributes that finds its cousin in the increased policing, cameras, and defensive architecture that takes over the artwashed physical space. The socalled vibrancy is dulled by security. Everything in a McDonald’s is essentially like the last McDonald’s one may have been in, from the experience of ordering to the placement of the logo throughout the space. Discussing this while swiping through photos of art galleries, lofts, and decorative street art from Aalborg, Miami, and a dozen other cities brought us again and again to Ritzer’s fourth category: predictability. The nearduplicate experience from location to location is one of the first things that comes to mind when thinking of McDonald’s, appreciated by some and loathed by others, but nonetheless quintessential. Looking at images of McDonald’s outposts worldwide that are considered to be unique because they inhabit atypical architectures for fast-food franchising and branding – such as Melbourne’s well-known art deco Macca’s in Clifton Hill – did not feel altogether that different for us than viewing new museum sites and expansions from the last twenty years. Sure, they have specificities, but the blue-chip collections and sheen of official culture quickly become routine from one to the next. No matter where a McDonald’s appears, one has somewhat been there before. Prior to our meeting at the McDonald’s, I had spent days at Aalborg’s Nordkraft, a former power plant turned arts centre with the same aestheticised rawness I have seen in Denver’s RiNo Arts District, or Brooklyn’s DUMBO. Right across from Nordkraft is the Coop Himmelb(l)au-designed House of Music, dropped centrestage on the waterfront just like Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s ICA Boston or Heatherwick Studio’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. Predictably, sleek, placeless housing was materialising nearby. Where does all this pricey banality stop? It likely does not cease in the years ahead so much as it mutates to become even more blatant and less sitespecific, more Domino’s and less pizza napoletana. Developers and their sympathisers have already learned that they can be their own creatives, and use the symbols of art to do the trick just as well as any actual artists, galleries, and artworks: see high-profile examples such as Heatherwick Studio’s Vessel, a building-scale Instagram monument at the heart of Manhattan’s hedge-fund neighbourhood of Hudson Yards that was paired with The Shed, a WeWork-style arts centre based in a building named for Bloomberg (mayor and corporation) and designed by, of course, Diller Scofidio + Renfro.7 Likewise, the artworld’s supposed cultural cachet already is being sourced elsewhere as real estate marketers pivot to embracing the restaurant industry’s even greater willingness to spearhead

speculation and generally more immediate accessibility to gentrifier incomes. Los Angeles’s Arts District, for example, is these days much more a costly dining destination for visitors than any place for studios or gallery entrepreneurs.8 Owners of post-industrial spaces are shortening – and likely soon skipping – the intermediate step of art attracting attention to disinvested areas’ and moving faster toward the condos or shopping or food hall phase: this has happened in the last decade in locations such as Chicago’s Fulton Market and Tampa’s Armature Works and is underway at Aalborg’s Spritten distillery, among so many other old brick buildings. Sculptures, street art, and upstart architects may still serve as flourishes, but they are to be needed far less as independent contractors. Thus, the artists and architects who are uninterested in being easily disposable tools of accelerated neoliberal gentrification any longer might start to recall the power of refusal. Fifty years ago, in the aftermath of the late 1960s, both disciplines saw era-defining rejections of the practices and institutions that formed the status quo. From radical practices of post-studio art and post-building architecture, à la Italy’s Superstudio, to experimental education, such as the founding of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCIArc) by those rejecting older, more formal models, the results were far more influential than lockstep cooperation could ever have been. Hesitant practitioners today who are tired of being the “foot soldiers of capitalism” but immediately wondering where their stability might come from without the artwashing apparatus, might learn something from Boyle Heights.9 In the face of the multi-million-dollar real estate scheme that sought to artwash one of Los Angeles’s most culturally impactful barrios, Boyle Heights locals opted to organise; to demonstrate power and dismiss the notion of unavoidable acquiescence that so many artists and architects subscribe to. Area community organiser Leonardo Vilchis explains the reason for (and consequence of) community resistance and refusal as a strategy, rather than a politics of appeasement or compromise. “The only way you can start this conversation is by saying no… And that’s terrifying because you’re a jerk who says no. But we have had more negotiations now since we’ve said no than if we had said yes.”10 Refusal is an opening, not an ending. Counterfeit culture designed in the C-suite does not really belong anywhere anyway and Boyle Heights has continued to produce art uninterrupted despite having less galleries. Consider where your work belongs. All it takes is a meeting at the nearest McDonald’s to start envisioning something else.

Anthony Carfello’s editorial and curatorial projects trace how buildings, communities, and places are experienced and controlled. He is an adjunct instructor for Temple University's Los Angeles program. Formerly, he was deputy director of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles.

Notes

1 O’Sullivan, Feargus., June 24 2014. “The Pernicious Realities of Artwashing” Bloomberg.

2 “Greenwashing” generally means the implication of some product or activity being ecologically minded when such claims are misleading or entirely unfounded.

3 “Pinkwashing” was coined by author Sarah Shulman as a criticism of politicians and governments such as Israel’s using LGBTQ tolerance as justification for nationalism and xenophobia.

4 Recently, it has been suggested that the Saudi Arabian government has been attempting to artwash its reputation through large-scale, arts tourism initiatives in the Al-'Ula desert region, Desert X AlUla and the Wadi Al Fann, or “Valley of the Arts.” See Gareth Harris (2022) “Accessible to all or elitist artwashing? Desert X opens second Saudi Arabia edition,” Art Newspaper, February 10

5 Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. 2022. Boyle Heights Against Artwashing and Displacement, “Contra-Against the Artwashing of Boyle Heights,” accessed June 29 2022 https://artwashing.antievictionmap.com.

6 Ritzer, George., 1993. The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Life, Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

7 More or less Vessel is an arrangement of luxury staircases. Calls to dismantle or alter the structure have grown louder following several suicides between 2019 and 2021.

8 Fittingly, the most visible gallery in the area is Hauser and Wirth, itself a multinational chain business.

9 Pritchard, Stephen., September 13 2016. “Hipsters and artists are the gentrifying foot soldiers of capitalism,” The Guardian

10 Miranda, Carolina., October 14 2016. “‘Out!’ Boyle Heights activists say white art elites are ruining the neighborhood … but it’s complicated,” Los Angeles Times