Interestingly, the latest New Yorker had a laudatory article about The Shed.
Miriam
The Real Russian Menace Is Just Hypercapitalism
The Real Russian Menace Is Just Hypercapitalism
The Vessel, also known as the Hudson Yards Staircase, in New York City.
(John Nacion / AP)
In the years leading up to the 2014 Winter Olympics, Russia spent something
on the order of $50 billion to turn the sleepy Black Sea vacation town of
Sochi into a glittering destination resort full of high-end amenities,
luxury housing, international cuisine, palm trees and promenades. A giant
ski resort bloomed across the slopes of the nearby western Caucasus
mountains. Western journalists who arrived weeks before the games delighted
in posting examples of incompetent (and, by implication, corrupt) building
and construction, although many of thesesuch as a notorious photo of a
bathroom stall with two toilets and a single toilet-paper dispenserwere
later debunked.
Sochi and the 2014 Olympics became a byword for Russias notorious public
graft, its estimated costs exceeding even those of the famously elaborate
and expensive 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. And Sochi itself has become, in
the American press, a go-to metonym for the autocratic governing regime of
Vladimir Putin.
President Trump has Mar-a-Lago and all the Trumpian gilded splendor behind
the club gates, reads a recent Washington Post report, whereas, Sochi,
host of the 2014 Winter Games, is all about Russian President Vladimir
Putina place to host foreign envoys and indulge in some Putin-style
diversions.
Sochi, in many ways, offers a distilled image of the country [Putin] wants
Russia to be, the Post continues. Multibillion-dollar construction
projects by Putins friends and oligarchs have created some of Russias
bestand most expensiveinfrastructure.
This is a common formulation in coverage of Russia, a sort of half-baked
orientalism in which the omnipresent hand of a half-divine potentate directs
the activities of an entire society. And to be fair, Russia is a highly
centralized state with a uniquely powerful president. But in raising the
specter of Donald Trumps tacky, expensive Mar-a-Lago, the suggestion is
that Trumpwith his own anti-democratic impulses and at-least-incidental
connections to both the Russian state and its powerful oligarchsis in
some sense steering the U.S. toward a version of this Russian caricature:
corrupt, dictatorial, designed and directed toward the whims of its maximum
leader.
We do not have oligarchs in Americaour press reserves that title for
devious foreignersbut we do have developers. I cant read about Sochi,
where the Spanish gourmet food shop in the former Olympic Village serves
fresh-cut jamón until midnight, where, [f]rom behind your rustic board of
cheese and ham, you can now gaze across a concrete expanse toward the
Olympic stadiums and building facades bathed in elaborate, shifting lights,
without thinking of New York Citys recently completed Hudson Yardsa $25
billion development on the West Side of Manhattan whose cross-cultural
alchemy produces, in the words of Eater, a blood-red product sporting the
dense chew of a firm steak, the fire of hot wings, and the complex, nutty
porkiness of Spanish Iberico. All of this amid a towering array of
overpriced glass towers and within walking distance of The Vessel, an
intriguing bronze-shawarma-Eiffel-Tower-thingy at the center of a
megablock.
Hudson Yards was developed by two opaque private firms, Oxford Properties, a
Canadian company, and The Related Companies, LP, a firm founded by former
tax attorney and New York real estate mogul Stephen Ross. It was built on
public land and incentivized with $6 billion in tax breaks.
The development incorporates a massive arts complex named The Shed, which
has been inexplicably hailed by critics as the one decent piece of
architecture in the whole development, even though it looks like the sort of
oversized ice cube youll find in a bar serving craft cocktails. It will
be run by Alex Poots, a peripatetic arts impresario who previously ran the
Manchester International Festival and Park Avenue Armory.
Well, Sochi has Hans-Joachim Frey, the former director of the Semperoper in
Dresden, Germany, and per the Post, the artistic director of the Sirius
Foundation, which converted many of the facilities in the Olympic Park to
the center for gifted kids from across Russia. Culture-washing, shameless,
commercial real-estate development is part of the universal language of
capitalism.
This, I think, is the critical point. There is much to dislike about
contemporary Russia, but its absurd to pretend that its hypercapitalist
development, its overinvestment in a few glittering cities at the expense of
a decaying and struggling hinterland, represent anything other than the
typical pattern in most advanced countries today. It is perhaps where Russia
most resembles the so-called West.
Over the last several years, as the baroque tale of election interference
and Trump family connections to Russian money unspooled in elaborate and
conspiratorial fashion, the American resistance, and much of mainstream
American journalism, grew increasingly unhinged regarding all things Russia.
Magazine graphic design shops bizarrely confused St. Basils Cathedral with
the Kremlin, while Internet resistance types began popularizing
Trump-Russia images featuring the hammer and sickle of the long-collapsed
Soviet Union. Perhaps youve seen the graphic emblazoned on a T-shirt.
Either way, its a strange fantasy. Since the fall of the USSR and the
America-led social catastrophe of economic shock therapy, Russia has emerged
as one of the most unfettered capitalist economies in the world, a Wild West
of unregulated markets with a yawning gap between the very, very rich and
everybody else. Sochi is less Mar-a-Lago than it is Billionaires Rowor
half of Brooklyn, or waterfront Miami. The end of history, it turns out, is
the same luxury condominium complex overgrowing the whole world.
Jacob Bacharach
Jacob Bacharach is the author of the novels "The Doorposts of Your House and
on Your Gates" and "The Bend of the World." His most recent book is "A Cool
Customer: Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking."
Jacob Bacharach
