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Totemizing wreckage as an ostensible reworking of trauma - or as the PR calls it, "poetic metaphor" for artifactual images of the "place's" political and social ideologies, remnant of the politics that wrought them - would feel a bit more genuine if it wasn't so aestheticized by what we could call "the big shiny": its auto-declaration as Art, a gloss and arrangement that no one could mistake. Something had started to call it ruin porn, a stylized violence, like they actually ship the wreckage of 9/11 around to be gawked at, souvenirs of cruelty or imperialism, and often aestheticized. These you get to project your own fantasy disaster movie scene into.
