Detroit Industry Murals | Hacker News Reader

Detroit Industry Murals

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75 pointsskruger33 comments

People have asked me why visit Detroit? Detroit was a very rich city once known as the Paris of the Midwest.

My answer almost always involves the arts. The DIA and the Henry Ford are the two huge ones but there are lots of other less known museums. One example is the Charles H. Wright museum of African American history, I've never known another one to equal it.

A couple more would be the Motown museum which is under construction now and will quadruple in size. The Detroit Historical Museum which is not only useful for the city's history but it's number one business which is automobiles.

One of my favorites is the Ford Piquette Avenue plant which is where the Model T was first built. Not only do you get a history of the company and a chance to see Henry's office and that of his chief engineer C. Harold Wills but a complete collection of all the models Ford built before the Model T.

Philip Jarmain captureed an echo of Detroit’s former opulence in a series of photographs titled American Beauty:

https://www.kostuikgallery.com/project/american-beauty/

Three updates since those pictures have been taken. The State of Michigan has poured tens of millions into Belle Isle (an island in the Detroit River that's a park) and that includes the aquarium.

Ford bought Michigan Central Depot and is pouring a couple of hundred million restoring it and two nearby buildings. It will be the headquarters for their self driving team and other car related tech. The first floor will be rented to merchants. The old General Motors building was like that. You could eat, buy a suit or see the dentist all without leaving the building. You think Silicon Valley invented that sort of thing?

The David Whitney building has been completely restored and is now a five star hotel. There has been so much demand for hotel apartments that they're converting I think the two top floors.

https://historicdetroit.org/galleries/david-whitney-building...

Indeed. It’s hard to understate what kind of city Detroit was at its peak. I think Silicon Valley would be an appropriate analogy.

The Henry Ford museum is truly remarkable and a place you can spend your entire day.

Robert Lacy's biography "Ford" has a brief but entertaining discussion of the making of the mural. Edsel Ford kind-of knew what he was getting into, but he didn't really expect a Marxist polemic to the dignity of labour.

Henry Ford senior was a complex, hateful, racist, antisemitic reactionary, prepared to hire goons with machine guns to take on strikers but also capable of investing in illiterate and monoglot immigrant workers with housing above standard for the time, and wages designed to kill his Detroit competition.

Crazy like a fox and a bastard to his family. He cannot have been ignorant of Diego Garcia's world view and yet.. the mural remains. I have no doubt ford senior could have killed the project if he wanted to. Henry died in 1947.

Ford's conflicted relationship with Edsel who was into modernist art lies at the heart of it I think: Edsel wanted to show he was above the shenanigans of his father, he funded the work. Henry bought up old time tractors and Edison lab trash for his historical museum in Dearborne. He wasn't into funding socialist artists.

Unlike the one Diego Rivera did for Rockerfeller, with Lenin in it, which was covered up.

It is unlikely either Ford was very familiar with Diego Garcia.

It is an island in the Indian Ocean.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia

Yes. Great typo on my part, I got it right at least once

See Mexican Muralism to learn more about this art style.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_muralism

Nowhere near as impressive as in person, but the close-up view of the high murals is nice. I haven't been to the DIA in too long!

It's a great experience for sure.

The Detroit Industry Murals reminded me of the Coit Tower Murals [1] which turns out to be more than mere coincidence: Several artists who worked at Coit Tower, including the project director Victor Arnautoff, had worked with or were otherwise inspired by Diego Rivera [2] [3].

[1]: https://argcs.com/portfolio-item/coit-tower-murals/

[2]: https://livingnewdeal.org/projects/coit-tower-arnautoff-mura...

[3]: http://www.coittower.org/artists/bios.html

If you want to learn more about these murals this might be of interest - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000pm01

If art's worth is merely the response it illicits, bravo. Vile.

What’s vile here?

The art looks unique, detailed, and dynamic.

Different strokes. It looks an unrefined, unskilled imitation of 100 year old art styles to me.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean, but the mural is close to 100 years old.

That would make it the tasteless trash from a vile era. Artists who knew they would never surpass the old masters, so they instead said, "are the old masters' works even that good?" Followed shortly by shit and menstrual blood smeared canvases

I think you're confusing two completely different periods and approaches to art. That "vile era" also produced Grant Wood and plenty of other iconic American artists, so it's not even clear what you're referring to (unless you just don't like anything contemporary, in which case, good for you?).

When I looked at it I thought it looked dreary and "communist" somehow.. don't know why but I looked the artist up and yep... he was a communist. Is that a thing? Communist art style?

My father pointed out how it's Communist art when I saw it as a kid. It always struck me as odd that it was displayed so prominently, as if to say, "Were Detroit. You know we're about cars. But we're also about ultimately giving the proletariat control over the means of production! Detroit shall rise again!"

At least it made more of an impression on me than impressionist paintings of hay stacks I guess...

If these murals were posted to DeviantArt under a fake name, I think most would react like the parent comment. Social cueing plays a big role in how people publicly respond to art.

I don't think so -- most DeviantArt works don't look like 1930s Works Progress/Socialist Realism.

If what you mean is that the historical context of the art makes it particularly interesting, then sure. That's always been true!

I can't find it now, but there's a piece by some writer where he interviews a New York City art critic. It takes some wheedling and wearing down, but eventually he gets the critic to admit that if a particular piece of abstract art weren't presented as "by so-and-so the Famous Artist," the critic wouldn't consider the work notable, valuable, or really very appealing at all. By itself, the work isn't very good. It only has value when attached to a brand and the according social expectations.

That's what I meant by context and social cueing.

I think this is a common observation in the art world. But we're not bound to the art world's perverse economic incentives, and Works Progress are in particular was created with consumption by mass Americans in mind.

(I also think they're basically unknown to ordinary Americans, ironically, making the social cueing you're describing even more difficult.)

One maybe needs to know Picasso could (and did) paint in other styles, with phenomenal skill, to decide to appreciate his more cartoon like work as a conscious choice. For more modern artists who emerge rapidly into their style, It can be hard to look at a filthy unmade bed, (Tracy Emin) or half a shark in a tank of Formaldehyde (Damien Hirst) and feel like you aren't having the mickey taken. Or Kapoor "owning" Vantablack, and displaying giant mounds of dry colour. Or Oldenburg's "big things" which are all over the US as civic art.

A lot of the critique of Koons comes down to his emulating the Warhol "Factory" model. His personal input into the outcome is sometimes questionable. Why don't we say the same about Andy? Maybe we should?

"Punch" magazine had a cartoon decades ago ranking real unsigned picasso value over faked picasso real signature. Dali (for instance) was sort-of tricked into signing a shedload of paper, maybe he didn't care, maybe he wanted to get rid of the interloper, but there are now works which have valid authenticated signature but which are probably fake art.

(I don't like a lot of picasso btw. I prefer matisse, a contemporary, and I think every bit as revolutionary in his own way)

I don’t like Picasso either (as much as I’ve tried), and I agree with the sentiments around “factory” contemporary art like Warhol and Koons. To me, these embody the worst (and naturally consequent) excesses of art capitalism.

I don't "like" Bacon. or, Lucien Freud, or Basquiat. All three are patently immensely skilled artists, caught up in their own world. They have major works in galleries and I like to see them but spend no time engaging with them.

This is probably why I can't be a decent art critic: I'm too bound up in what I like, rather than what I can say about work I don't like, but do admire. Nobody expects an art critic to like everything but they have to be able to be lucid about the work. I just can't fathom whats going on in Francis Bacon's mind, or Basquiat.

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