Detroit Speaks: Dora Apel
Wednesday, October 7
In her new book entitled Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of images of Detroit, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization.
Dora Apel is a professor of art history and visual culture and W. Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair in Modern and Contemporary Art History at Wayne State University.
Detroit Speaks is sponsored in part by a grant from the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan.