Harvey article

POPULAR CAPITALISM AND POPULAR CULTURE
By David Harvey

My experience of visiting the Bradbury building in LA, which was used prominently in the film Blade Runner, was disappointing because of the state of the building. The building in the film was presented as many buildings and the city in the film as dirty old run down and used. The Building today has been renovated to the point that it is an artificial image of itself. It holds no reference to the life it lived over the last hundred years It makes me think of histrorical preservation projects and the idea that fixing them up and repainting them to look as they once did changes them and removes it from its historical narrative. The thing becomes understood as an object of the past with a constructed image of it of the past as represented in the present. The building in its ruined and used state could be considered a romanticized picture of itself but it seems to hold more truth than that of what exists today. This relates to Harvey’s article in that it talks about the construction of the image of a thing say with the political image of Reagan as the ‘teflon president‘ where his pubic image was so strong that it prevented any truth from tarnishing this image. Maybe the idea of creating this pristine example of the Bradbury holds up in that the tourists who come to see it can believe in it as a working building as opposed to the reality of the building as what it used to be. Both relate to the idea that an image can be constructed whether true or not and that both are concerned with aesthetics as opposed to ethics.