Living Large
The [Tiny House] trend manages to cram a tremendous number of tedious affectations into tight quarters: design fetishism, ostentatious minimalism, costly self-abnegation. Shafrir points out that it’s “not new for people to be living in R.V.s or mobile homes; it’s just that there’s a new vocabulary to gentrify living in a small space.”
— Willy Staley in “When ‘Gentrification’ Isn’t About Housing” in this week’s NYT mag.
Spot on, and the rest of the article’s pretty good as well at highlighting the sort of colonization of the authentic and everyday by the Hip that goes on in the process of gentrification. But it’s also difficult not to notice that so much of the intellectual backlash to gentrification and the colonization of previously-unknown or localized things, or of gritty locales, etc., is at least a bit about losing the ability to identify yourself as an explorer, someone knowledgeable in trends before they’re trends, someone who knew that authentic local food place or neighborhood back when it was still obscure, etc. The loss of feeling special, in other words.
And I’m potentially a good example of this, I guess, as someone who’s been unintentionally pretty good at choosing to live in places (Newtown, Jingletown, Darlington, etc.) that typically became trendy and / or gentrified around me after I’d lived there a while.
But for me “authenticity” in this context has always been a dirty word, up there with “purity” — both those words being loaded with associations to the sort of Fascisms and Leftisms I abhor. “Authenticity” isn’t something that draws attention to itself; and when you draw attention to it in something, you add a layer of “authenticity” that can smother the original. The “authentic” is not (the) authentic. The authentic is impure, the authentic is a jumble of things, the authentic is hard to spot (especially if you’re an outsider). But, especially, the “authentic” — like “the pure” — is used to divide Us and Them.
