On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place

Believing that the unexamined experience is not worth having, Lippard (The Lure of the Local) is a tourist with a problem: she can't relax. In this blend of cultural criticism and on-the-road dispatch, Lippard examines the links between tourism and exploitation. A chapter on ""Tragic Tourism"" investigates the attraction of ""celebrity murder sites, concentration camps, massacre sites."" Her conclusions are appropriately nuanced: on the one hand, monuments ""inspire secondary memories that can color or even interfere with responses to the primary event""; on the other, ""remembrance is the only way to compensate the dead."" Lippard's critical lingo is sometimes clunky, but her willingness to implicate herself in her critique makes the book accessibly personal (""I am resigned to looking like a tourist wherever I go, even at home, because I'm always rubbernecking""). This tendency lends a depth and power to her interrogation of the ways that Anglo tourism has made Santa Fe into ""Santa Fake,"" through the trivialization and commodification of native and hispano cultures. As Lippard admits, it was after repeated tourist visits that she decided to move to the area. But Lippard is always on guard against the placid acceptance of tourism, always aware of the ways it can be an egregious indulgence of the affluent who are transforming the world in their own image. (Apr.)