By John Miller
Egotopia explains why person political and fiscal pursuits have eclipsed aesthetic concerns within the rampant billboards, department stores, and concrete sprawl of the hot American Landscape.Egotopia starts the place different opinions of the yankee panorama finish: deciding on the actual ugliness that defines and homogenizes America's towns, suburbs, and nation-state. Believing that winning tests of the yankee panorama are insufficient and injudicious, John Miller calls into query the normal knowledge of environmentalists, city planners, and designers alike. during this precedent-shattering exam of what he sees because the ugliness that's the American buyer society, Miller contends that our aesthetic situation will be totally understood merely by way of explorers of the metaphoric environment.Metaphorically, the ugliness of America's nice suburban sprawl is the actual manifestation of our expanding narcissism- our egotopia. The ubiquity of psychotherapy as a medium selling self-indulgence has deified deepest guy because it has demonized public guy. the hot American panorama, Miller argues, isn't any longer the actual manifestation of public and communal values. as an alternative it has turn into a projection of personal fantasies and narcissistic self-indulgence. person pursuits and personal passions can not tolerate, nor even realize, aesthetic matters in this kind of panorama devoted to uncompromising notions of application.
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Extra info for Egotopia: Narcissism and the New American Landscape
Sample text
Without an aesthetic interpreta- Page 5 tion, history, demographics, sociology, and architecture offer merely discrete, patternless, and essentially incomplete and unsatisfying explanations of the transition from farm, to factory, to shopping mall, and beyond. To grasp fully the dynamics of the changing American landscape is to identify and ultimately understand an emerging twenty-first-century American aesthetic. While being neither as benign as the agrarian nor as de facto as the industrial, the New American Landscape will be the first synthetic environment in history whose aesthetics will systematically anesthetize those who call it home.
However, we seem unaware of the meaning of what has transpired. There are moments in history that divide erasmoments that serve to direct our attention, to inform us of a fundamental shift in collective perception, in professed values. The emergence of the New American Landscape is just such a moment, whose significance, for the most part, has escaped the attention of sociologist, historian, and architectural critic alike. The New American Landscape has completely and totally altered the aesthetics of America.
The city demonstrated that our private foibles, weaknesses, and failures are insignificant compared to the accomplishment of our larger and mutually inclusive public enterprise. However, the death of the city and the swelling of the ranks of the undead signifies our disavowal of journeying toward a destination that is never to be reached. No longer are we to be satisfied by what we consider the dubious rewards of merely striving to construct our individual and corporate selves. Today, we believe in the power of our technology to literally achieve individual and collective ends.