Call Yourself a Critic?

STATE OF THE ART

The untidy tradition of criticism

In 1976, Peter Schjeldahl resolved to abandon art criticism for good. He only lasted a couple of years, but when he quit he wrote a deeply ambivalent farewell. The result was ‘Dear Profession of Art Writing’, a long poem which ping-pongs between mea culpa and critique, as Schjeldahl – who would later join The Village Voice in 1980 then The New Yorker in 1998 – weighs up the life of a jobbing critic. It’s an odd piece, apologizing for over-hasty trashings while at the same time scattering barbs about peers and elders. Some of those mentioned include Hilton Kramer (‘makes art sound as appealing as a deodorant enema’), Harold Rosenberg (‘honey-tongued blowhard’), Rosalind Krauss (‘let me out of here!’) and Clement Greenberg (‘worm-eaten colossus’).

Towards the end of the poem, Schjeldahl decides that he has no regrets, referring with some affection to the ‘tidy guild’ of art writers. On first reading, this idea of an ordered community felt about right, even comforting, though when I recently came across the line again it seemed less accurate. For one thing, critics – more than artists and curators – tend to work alone; while there are professional bodies, it’s mostly a solo pursuit, a lot of which takes place before any conversation with an editor. And, of course, few critics are only critics: writing is typically supplemented by curating, teaching, freelance editing, assisting artists, bar-tending, or whatever other work is around. I’ve met art critics who moonlight as anything from cricket correspondents to cheesemongers.

While professional hybridizations may be the norm today – try finding an art journal by-line that lists only one activity and one city of residence – working ‘between’ has often been the common mode for the art critic. From poet-critics (Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, Frank O’Hara), dealer-critics (Félix Fénéon, Daniel Kahnweiler) and artist-critics (Donald Judd, Robert Smithson), criticism is rarely the sole province of those who best practice it. This continues today: as artist Hito Steyerl notes in her collected essays, she writes during (and between) a string of residencies and teaching positions, a writing environment shaped by flexibility and interruption. Criticism is genetically untidy.

What does the way in which critics define themselves today tell us about how they conceive of their relationship to art and to writing? A recent panel discussion at the ICA in London, titled ‘The Trouble With Art Criticism’ (has there been a writing panel in the last decade that hasn’t alluded to some crisis? Surely any crisis isn’t limited to the domain of criticism?), included writers, editors and curators, but only one of the five participants was identified as a critic. Of course, disavowing the term gets around the thorny issue of whether or not it’s the critic’s business to be dealing in judgements, but with what should it be replaced?

In recent years various contenders have emerged. One popular handle is ‘art writer’, suggestive of creativity rather than sniping, opting for a stance – frictionless and mobile – over a critical position. This is not to be confused with the expanding field of ‘art writing’, usefully ambiguous about whether the subject or the writing is the ‘art’. More cynically, Boris Groys once wrote that after judgement has melted away all that is left is commentary: he favours the epithet ‘art commentator’ over ‘critic’, one who protects the modesty of the art with a ‘textual bikini’. The late Stuart Morgan had no problems with the term critic, but – in a wonderful lecture titled ‘Homage to the Half-Truth’ (1991) – suggested that criticism, or ‘the act of shifting an experience from one language to another’, was closer to translation than to commentary. He perhaps had in mind Susan Sontag’s well-known argument, in ‘Against Interpretation’ (1966), for the impossibility of adequately translating the art work, though I think she would have supported Morgan’s insistence on a continuing attentiveness to language – something for which Groys has little time.

More recently, John Kelsey offered another alternative. Kelsey occupies an unusually multi-hyphenated position, in that as well as producing criticism he is a gallerist (at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York), one who sells the work he produces as an artist (as part of Bernadette Corporation), and is also an editor and professor. There have been occasions when, in a single magazine, he is simultaneously advertiser, reviewer and reviewed, a degree of entanglement he signals by labelling himself a ‘hack’, with its connotations of Grub Street drudgery. This half-serious suggestion, which Kelsey made during a 2007 lecture at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, offers a replacement for the critic who is ‘not up to the task of reinventing himself to meet the conditions he’s working under today’ – call it critic 2.0. Tellingly, Kelsey’s strawman is referred to exclusively as a ‘he’, and the version of critical activity that he would rather do away with – dogmatic, predicated on good ‘taste’ – feels haunted by the masculine mandarins of the 1950s and ’60s. But when Rosenberg and Greenberg are invoked as emblematic of a certain kind of monolithic criticism, which they often are, it’s usually forgotten that the former started out as a poet and survived as a sometime ad man, and that the latter began as a customs official with a background in literature. They were both multi-taskers too.

Is there a connection between Schjeldahl’s farewell and Kelsey’s cheerful elegy? Whether implying a tidy guild or a critic who is impeccably disinterested, each account constructs a kind of figure that I’m not sure ever existed: one who is undistracted, part of a pure tradition and devoted to a single pursuit. But if criticism has often been characterized by a lack of codification, perhaps it’s better to think of it as a number of related practices with different goals rather than a uniform field of activity. This untidiness could be a virtue.

Sam Thorne

is associate editor of frieze. He is based in London, UK.

Top 10 lists: most commonly used word, phrases and names

The Top Words of 2011
Rank / Word / Comments
1. Occupy – ‘Occupy’ has risen to pre-eminence through Occupy Movement, the occupation of Iraq, and the so-called ‘Occupied Territories’.
2. Deficit – Growing and possibly intractable problem for the economies of the developed world.
3. Fracking – Hydraulic fracturing is a controversial method for extracting fossil fuels from hitherto unreachable deposits.
4. Drone – The ever increasing number of remotely piloted aircraft used for reconnaissance and attack purposes.
5. Non-veg – A meal served with meat, originally from India, now catching on worldwide.
6. Kummerspeck – From the German seeing wider acceptance in the English, excess weight gained from emotional overeating (grief bacon).
7. Haboob – A name imported from the Arabic for massive sandstorms in the American Southwest.
8. 3Q – Near universal term for ‘thank you’ now earning additional status after being banner from official Chinese dictionaries. Another example of the ever increasing mixing of numbers and letters to form words.
9. Trustafarians – Well-to-do youth (trust-funders) living a faux-Bohemian life style, now associated with the London Riots.
10. (The Other) 99 – Referring to the majority of those living in Western Democracies who are left out of the dramatic rise in earnings associated with “the Top 1%”.

The Top Phrases of 2011
Rank / Phrase / Comment
1. Arab Spring – The series of uprisings, social protests, and rebellions occurring among many nations of the Arab World beginning this spring.
2. Royal Wedding – The wedding of the former Kate Middleton and heir-to-the-British-Throne, Prince William that captivated millions around the world.
3. Anger and Rage – Characterizations of the global electorate by the pundits, though closer analyses has revealed more frustration than anger and more disappointment than rage.
4. Climate Change – No. 1 phrase for the first decade of the 21st century; still resonates into its second decade.
5. The Great Recession – Though officially over, the media term most frequently used to describe the on-going global economic restructuring.
6. Tahrir Square – The scene of the ‘25th of January’ demonstrations in Cairo against Hosni Mubarak.
7. Linear No Threshold (LNT) – The methodology to calculate risk from exposure to radioactive elements from the Fukushima Daiiachi disaster.
8. Bunga Bunga – Re-emerged in the language through ‘bunga-bunga’ parties hosted by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
9. ‘How’s that working out for you?’ – The New York Times credits Sarah Palin, but it predates her use of the phrase by several decades.
10. “Make no mistake about it!” – President Obama has repeated the phrase thousands of times since his 2008 election.

The Top Names of 2011
Rank / Name / Comments
1. Steve Jobs – The citations for Steve Jobs topped those for No. 2 (Osama bin-Laden and Seal Team 6) by more than 30%.
2. Osama bin-Laden & Seal Team 6 – Who changed the world more? Al-qaeda or Steve Jobs?
3. Fukashima – The epicenter of the Japanese Triple Disaster (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown).
4. Mohamed Bouazizi – the Tunisian fruit vendor who set himself afire and became the symbol of Tunisian resistance – and the Arab spring.
5. Chinese Paramount Leader Hu Jintao – The Rise of the Tiger being a primary cause of the Global Economic Restructuring.
6. Kate Middleton – She captivated the world with her elegance and style and continues to do so as the Duchess of Cambridge.
7. Muammar Gaddafi – Libyan strongman toppled in the recent insurrection.
8. President Obama – Hope and Change retreat further into the history books; the game plan is now for survival.
9. PIIGS – The nations of Portugal, Ireland, Italy Greece and Spain taken together for their untenable deficits possibly affecting the economic health of the Eurozone.
10. Yaroslavl Lokomotiv – The ill-fated elite Russian hockey team that was virtually wiped out in the crash of a three-engine Yak-42.

Exclusive! Newly discovered Leonardo Da Vinci / Di Caprio painting/movie collaboration unveiled at Reena Spaulings!!!

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Ruin lust: our love affair with decaying buildings

As much-admired photographs of decayed Detroit go on show in London, Brian Dillon charts the history of a literary and artistic obsession with ruins, from Marlowe to The Waste Land to Tacita Dean

• Brian Dillon
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 February 2012 22.55 GMT
• Article history

Waiting Hall Michigan Station, Detroit, by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

Early in May 1941, the novelist and essayist Rose Macaulay was staying at the Hampshire village of Liss, attending to family arrangements following the death of her sister Margaret. On the 13th she returned to London – since the start of the war she had lived in a flat at Luxborough House, Marylebone, and worked as a voluntary ambulance driver – and discovered that her home and all her possessions had been destroyed in the bombing a few nights before. In a letter to a friend and literary collaborator, Daniel George, she wrote: "I came up last night … to find Lux House no more – bombed and burned out of existence, and nothing saved. I am bookless, homeless, sans everything but my eyes to weep with … It would have been less trouble to have been bombed myself."

The story that Macaulay tells in Pleasure of Ruins is essentially a modern one: it is still alive today in photographs of post-industrial Detroitand recent responses by the likes of Iain Sinclair and Laura Oldfield Ford to the demolitions wrought in the name of the London Olympics. The taste for heroic destruction or picturesque decay cannot thrive without a sense of progress for which it fulfils the role of brooding, sometimes gleeful, unconscious. There were few if any classical or medieval enthusiasts of ruination. Even in renaissance painting, which is littered with mouldered remnants of Greco-Roman statuary and architecture, ruins are ancillary to the main pictorial event, providing a fractured backdrop to a serene madonna, or a handy bit of broken column to support a wilting St Sebastian. But by the 16th and 17th centuries, Macaulay wrote, something like the later literary and artistic obsession with ruins is in the air: Shakespeare and Marlowe inhabit "a ruined and ruinous world" of blasted heaths and crumbling castles, and there are resonant examples in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi: "I do love these ancient ruins: / We never tread upon them but we set / Our foot upon some reverend history."The loss of her flat, and especially the destruction of her library, had a profound effect on Macaulay: it was a decade before she completed another novel. In 1949, she lamented: "I am still haunted and troubled by ghosts, and I can still smell those acrid drifts of smouldering ashes that once were live books." But her memory of the blitz also nurtured a fascination with destruction, decay and the ambiguous emotions conjured by the sight of buildings and entire cities reduced to rubble. In 1953 Macaulay published Pleasure of Ruins, a lively and eccentric history of the "ruin lust" that gripped European art and literature in the 18th century, reached its height in the romantic period, and had apparently declined in the first half of the 20th century in the face of wreckage that could not be turned to aesthetic or nostalgic advantage.

It was in the 18th century, however, that the ruin arrived centre-stage in European art, poetry, fiction, garden design and architecture itself. A cult of melancholy collapse and picturesque rot took hold, especially of the English aristocracy, for whom no estate was complete without its mock-dilapidated classical temple, executed in stone, plastered brick or even (as the garden designer Batty Langley advised in 1728) cut-price painted canvas. The craze inspired some well-known architectural absurdities: in Westmeath in 1740 Lord Belvedere built a ruined abbey to block the view of a house where his ex-wife had taken up with his brother, and in 1796 William Beckford first contrived his fantasticalFonthill Abbey, "a sort of habitable ruin", according to Macaulay – "sort of'" because the thing kept falling down.

Alongside such follies there flourished a literature of pleasing desuetude, encompassing aesthetic theory, romantic poetry's rubble-strewn excursions and the dank precincts of the gothic novel. In his Elements of Criticism of 1762, Lord Kames had approved ruins, real or confected, for their embodying "the triumph of time over strength, a melancholy but not unpleasant thought". And the English romantics took to ruination with a paradoxical energy, Wordsworth uncovering his poetic self among the remnants of Tintern Abbey, Coleridge in the unfinished "Kubla Khan" deriving a whole aesthetic of the literary fragment out of his botched architectural fantasia.

If all of this seems like so much picturesque maundering, it was also evidence of a fretful modernity. It was in painting that the vexing timescale of the ruin was most accurately broached – ruins, it seemed, spoke as much of the future as of the classical or more recent past. For sure, romantic art is dominated by the sublime vistas of Caspar David Friedrich, whose lone figures look dolefully on the vacant arches of medieval abbeys. But the gaze might as easily be turned on catastrophes to come: in 1830 Sir John Soane commissioned the painter Joseph Gandy to depict his recently completed Bank of England in ruins. In France, Hubert Robert had already painted the Louvre in a state of collapse, prompting Diderot to write: "The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures."

This sense of having lived on too late, of having survived the demolition of past dreams of the future, is what gives the ruin its specific frisson, and it still animates art and writing. But it's historically bound up with more pressing worries about the fate of one's own civilisation: nowhere more so than in the literary and artistic afterlife of a ruinous motif conjured by Rose Macaulay's grand-uncle Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1840. Reviewing Leopold von Ranke's History of the Popes in the Edinburgh Review, Macaulay speculates that in the distant future Catholicism "may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul's". Macaulay's New Zealander, gazing at the wreckage of the metropolis (and by extension on the fall of the British empire), was for decades a popular image of London's future ruin – its most notable avatar is Gustave Doré's engraving The New Zealander.

Detail from the New Zealander by Gustave Doré

Images of the modern city in ruins proliferated in the Victorian period –Richard Jefferies's 1885 novel After London is the best-known example, with its vision of a city reverting to nature following some unnamed calamity – but the following century had another perspective on the now venerable and even hackneyed trope of ruin: for modernism the city, even (or especially) as it pretended to progress or novelty, was already in ruins. The Waste Land is an obvious instance, with its fragmentary vision of the unreal city. But consider too the photographs of Eugène Atget, which capture a Paris being demolished and rebuilt at the same time, or Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project: a critical-historical phantasmagoria conjured from the already decaying Parisian shopping arcades of just a few decades earlier. In architectural terms, the most thoroughgoing visions of the city of the future were haunted too by ruination: Le Corbusier's projected Ville Radieuse depended on the wholesale ruin of the existing city, and the classical kitsch that Albert Speer planned for Hitler's future Germania was designed with its potential "ruin value" in mind.

The second world war tested the taste for ruins to its limits – such wholesale destruction was surely unsuited to melancholy thoughts of an aesthetic cast. Rose Macaulay worries at the problem in the "Note on New Ruins" that she appended to Pleasure of Ruins: the bomb sites of London, she fears, are still too jagged and raw in the memory to qualify as ruins. And yet many of the most affecting images of the depredations of total war and, especially, of the bombing of cities are clearly indebted to romantic precursors. Macaulay herself was not immune to their pleasures: in 1949 her novel The World My Wilderness hymned the Eliotic wasteland that London had become, her feral teenage protagonists running wild among gaping cellars and ruderal meadows. One thinks, too, of Cecil Beaton's blitz photographs, or Paul Nash's 1941 painting Totes Meer and its rhyming of wrecked aircraft with Friedrich'sSea of Ice. In the immediate postwar period, it was cinema that frankly embraced the visual allure and import of the ruin. In Germany, an entire genre of "ruin films" arose out of the devastation caused by Allied carpet-bombing, though the signature film in terms of capturing the plight of Berlin's orphaned Trümmerkinder, or children of the ruins, was by an Italian director: Roberto Rossellini's Germany Year Zero of 1948.

Postwar culture is littered with images of ruins past and potentially to come, the levelled cities of Europe becoming mixed up with photographs and footage of real or anticipated nuclear destruction, the whole apocalyptic imaginary hardly alleviated by a sense that urban reconstruction was in itself a form of ruin lust: cities rising into wreckage and the earth poisoned by new industries. Chris Marker's La Jetée(1962) begins with views of post-apocalyptic Paris that are clearly mocked-up from photographs of real cities in ruin in the 1940s; Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (1964) shows the factory districts of Ravenna as a lurid, smoky hell that already looks post-industrial and decayed. And in the same decade JG Ballard began to formulate a view of ex-urban modernity — the concrete non-places of motorway flyovers and airport environs — as the landscape of a decidedly post-romantic sublime.

If Ballard is the English laureate of late-modern ruins, his influence still palpable in the writings of Iain Sinclair or the poetic dross-scape of Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley's recent book Edgelands, the figure around whom the artistic fascination with ruins has crystallised in recent years is the artist Robert Smithson. In the years before his death in 1973 Smithson, who had certainly been reading Eliot and Ballard, combined ambitious land-art projects (his Spiral Jetty of 1970 is the best known) with a series of inventive and wry essays on the ruinous condition of the modern American landscape. Writing of his native New Jersey in 1967, in an essay titled "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic", Smithson affected to have found, on the outskirts of a declining industrial town, the contemporary "eternal city": an agglomeration of half-built highways and rusting factory relics to rival the architectural and artistic treasures of ancient Rome. New Jersey, writes Smithson memorably, is "a utopia minus a bottom, a place where the machines are idle, and the sun has turned to glass".

Smithson's influence – and especially his notion of "ruins in reverse", in which construction and dissolution cannot be told apart – is all over the ruinous turn that many artists and writers took in the last decade or so. Tacita Dean's films are a case in point, with their frequent focus on defunct technology or architecture. Jane and Louise Wilson followed Ballard and the French urban theorist Paul Virilio in exploring the derelict remains of the Nazis' Atlantic Wall fortifications. Younger artists such as Cyprien Gaillard and collaborators Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry have continued to explore the idea of modern ruins, while Owen Hatherley's 2011 book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britainessayed a critique of the ruinous effects of recent urban planning in the UK. (Later this year Hatherley's sequel, A New Kind of Bleak will show that process nearing its endgame, from Aberdeen to Plymouth, Croydon to Belfast.)

An obsession with ruins can risk a fall into mere sentiment or nostalgia: ruin lust was already a cliché in the 18th century, and its periodic revivals may put one in mind of Gilbert and Sullivan: "There's a fascination frantic / In a ruin that's romantic." The great interest in the remarkable images of decayed Detroit – in the photographs, for example, of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, on show at the Wilmotte Gallery in London from this week – is easily understandable but seems oddly detached from analyses of the political forces that brought the city to its present sorry pass. It may be that as a cultural touchstone the idea of ruin needs to slump into the undergrowth again. But the history of ruin aesthetics tells us that it would likely resurface in time, charged again with artistic and political energy, and we'd find ourselves looking once more at blasted or burned cities with a visionary or melancholy eye, just as Rose Macaulay did in 1941, ambiguously lamenting a bombed-out house where "the stairway climbs up and up, undaunted, to the roofless summit where it meets the sky".

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AN EARLY ECO-CITY FACES THE FUTURE

The sun sets on a building at Arcosanti, an “urban laboratory” established in the 1970s in the Arizona desert. John Burcham for The New York Times

By MICHAEL TORTORELLO
NY Times Published: February 15, 2012

THE pilgrimage began with a black-and-white handbill on a campus bulletin board. At the top was a sketch of an ultramodern compound rising above a desert canyon: a city upon a hill.

Next came the manifesto. “If you are truly concerned about the problems of pollution, waste, energy depletion, land, water, air and biological conservation, poverty, segregation, intolerance, population containment, fear and disillusionment,” the poster began. Then, at the bottom, the remedy: “Join us.”

Occupying the middle of nowhere must have appealed to the students, architects and seekers of the 1970s who founded Arcosanti, an “urban laboratory” in the desert 70 miles north of Phoenix. After following a washboard road to the desolate camp, they would find a kind of kibbutz. Here, in workshops, they might build a 30-foot-high concrete vault or plant olive trees or cast bells in silt to sell for construction money.

Above all, they were able to join an ongoing colloquy with the city’s visionary designer, Paolo Soleri. In a cosmic language of his own invention (filled with phrases like the “omega seed” and “miniaturization-complexity-duration”), Mr. Soleri proselytized for a carless society in harmony with the natural world. Over the course of 40 years, some 7,000 souls would come and go.

For the most part, though, they left. And last fall, Mr. Soleri joined this group himself, retiring at age 92 as the president of the parent Cosanti Foundation.

Now, Arcosanti is experiencing its own version of Cuba’s “special period”: a transitional era of privation and possibility. And the man who would be Raúl Castro in this analogy is the foundation’s new president, Jeff Stein, 60, formerly dean of the Boston Architectural College.

As a resident of Arcosanti in its heyday, “he has all the qualities to be the guardian of the faith,” said Michel Sarda, 69, a foundation trustee and a publisher of Mr. Soleri’s books.

But if Mr. Stein can’t miraculously transform Arcosanti into a dense eco-city for 5,000 residents — and that was always Mr. Soleri’s plan — what should it become instead?

Mr. Sarda speaks enthusiastically about building a retirement tower for golf-shy retirees and the project’s alumni. Mr. Stein’s immediate proposals are more modest: a canopy for the outdoor amphitheater, a renovated commercial bakery, a storage unit for Mr. Soleri’s collection of fantastical architectural models and a half-dozen new apartments.

Whatever Mr. Stein may wish to do, for now it will have to be accomplished with an operating budget of less than $1 million. That annual sum includes payroll, utilities, food, building materials, insurance: everything. It is, by his estimation, about a 10th of what the community needs to build new housing and attract new residents and businesses. That is, to turn a somewhat derelict complex of a dozen-odd concrete structures into something more like a city.

His first job, perhaps, is to become an ambassador: to remind the world that Arcosanti exists as a going concern. Visitors (and some 25,000 stop here each year) often observe that this city of the future seems more like a city of the past. Part Mos Eisley, part Ozymandias. But that description fails to account for the 56 inspired souls who continue to live and work and dream in the Arcosanti that exists today.

One such latter-day disciple is Maureen Connaughton, 37, who until last year was a project manager in Philadelphia for a specialty fabrication company. On a cold Tuesday night in January, Ms. Connaughton was sitting with Mr. Stein and a few dozen of her fellow Arconauts in the dining hall, known as Crafts III in the local dialect, tucking into a community meal of breaded pork chops and fried tofu. They were bundled in sweaters and hats and Carhartt jackets. Mr. Soleri may have shown a genius for passive solar design, but at Arcosanti he didn’t really do central heat.

If you were an optimist, like Ms. Connaughton, who lives in an apartment beneath the cafe and dining hall, you might note that it’s easy to sleep in the cool Arizona winter. Yes, the building’s aging concrete has a habit of flaking onto your bed. But “what you get in exchange is just so worth it,” she said. “To have this big round window and look out at the canyon.”

At a fall building workshop here in 2010, she discovered how much she liked working with her hands. This is the opposite of the paper shuffling (or, worse, paperless shuffling) that defines the modern office job. Back in Philadelphia, Ms. Connaughton loaded up the car (“I need a lot less stuff than I did before,” she said) and headed west to cast ceramic wind bells.

“I really heard all the good and bad things people say about it being set in the past,” she said of Arcosanti, sipping a $2 glass of wine from the cafe’s tiny liquor cabinet. “And I want to see it set in the present. Because it’s my present.”

DURING Mr. Soleri’s long tenure, Arcosanti evolved into a surprising anachronism: a company town. The product line? Handmade bells and heady theories about imaginary cities, or “arcologies.” Ordinary capitalism — independent businesses and privately held homes — was anathema.

Mr. Soleri never bought into the standard American real estate hustle, Mr. Sarda recalled. “He would say, ‘Developer: it starts with ‘D,’ like ‘devil’ and ‘demon,’ ” Mr. Sarda said. “I cannot say that Paolo is a man of compromise.”

Or as one longtime foundry worker put it, “Who ever tried to build a city by selling art?”

At the most basic level, Mr. Stein seems to share Mr. Soleri’s knack for avoiding personal wealth. “The typical American c.e.o. makes 325 times what the company’s average worker earns,” Mr. Stein said. As the new director, “I’m two times the average salary.” And at Arcosanti, the average salary is minimum wage.

Yet smart young volunteers continue to trek here from faraway places like Australia, South Korea, Mexico, Chile, Italy and Jordan, paying to enroll in the construction workshops. A few of these folks will decide to stay, taking a job on site.

The commute can’t be beat. The Wi-Fi signal is strong. And residents pay just $160 a month for room and board. Yes, the room might be an unheated 8-by-8-foot cube in the psychedelic shantytown known as Construction Camp. But this is part of the experience, or the experiment, or whatever you want to call it.

“There are intentional communities all over the country,” Mr. Stein said. “This isn’t one of them. It’s almost an accidental community. People were drawn here by Paolo Soleri and the power of his ideas. And by the beauty of the place.”

The architectural intern Youngsoo Kim, 32, followed the beacon of Mr. Soleri’s writing to this sparse outpost from the megalopolis of Seoul.

On a bright Wednesday morning, Mr. Kim and his colleague Yasaman Esmaili were stretching a measuring tape across the curved concrete entryways of the East Crescent. This development (unfinished, of course) includes an outdoor amphitheater, administrative offices, a rec room, a handful of residences, the Soleri archives and the scenic guest quarters called the Sky Suite.

Though the cubes and apses of Arcosanti have been sketched and photographed in countless books and exhibitions, the site and building utilities are more of a mystery. In simpler terms, no one seems to have the foggiest idea where to find a light switch.

Prompted by Mr. Stein, the pair has been trying to remedy this situation, assembling up-to-date building information models. The construction “could have been done much better,” Mr. Kim said. “But it was also meaningful for it to be built by the people who learned the concept.”

The great masses of concrete act as a thermal sink, absorbing heat during the molten days and then radiating warmth at night. But the compound’s heating, windows and insulation — the foundations of most green building — seem to have been an afterthought. Ms. Esmaili, a 26-year-old graduate of the University of Tehran, hopes to study these systems while she waits to hear from Ph.D. programs.

Mr. Soleri originally envisioned a series of greenhouses that would occupy the hill below the complex. Hot air would rise from these conservatories into a complex of tunnels that could heat the East Crescent. At present, two trial greenhouses have been finished. For now, a single volunteer has been charged with growing what she can. For better or worse, the national food-gardening craze seems to have skipped Arcosanti.

Meanwhile, the project has only dabbled in popular technologies like solar panels, rain barrels and composting toilets, off-the-shelf gear that can be applied on a small scale.

“I should have them,” Mr. Soleri said during a recent visit to the project. Yet for most Americans, he maintained, chasing these technologies can become a game unto itself. “We are passionate collectors of gadgetries,” he said. “We can’t resist.”

Mr. Soleri likes to say that he “is a scatterbrain at this point.” But he still projects a commanding presence. Upon meeting a visitor outside on a frigid morning, he raised his hand and waved it to the side, as if to say, “Kindly step out of my sunlight!”

He seemed more comfortable after an espresso, back in his former apartment, a vaguely austere 700-square-foot studio with a two-burner cooktop and an open shower next to the toilet. The paint and the carpeting, now 30 years old, seem to be original. But then, no one ever accused Mr. Soleri of personal extravagance. As Mr. Kim said, “His humbleness and frugality shocked me.”

For several years, Mr. Soleri has lived in a tumbledown ranch at the nonprofit’s Cosanti campus, on the outskirts of Scottsdale. Though his former apartment now belongs to the new chief, Mr. Stein knocked politely at the front door. He worked alongside Mr. Soleri for eight years, in the 1970s and ’80s. And if he has a skeptical thought about his mentor’s legacy, you won’t hear him voice it in public.

Mr. Soleri, however, will discuss his marvelous, flawed creation with disarming frankness. Has Arcosanti, for instance, lived up to its potential?

“No. Don’t be silly,” he said, and then laughed. “If you become a writer or you become a sculptor or a scientist, most of the time you’re able to generate yourself a means to carry on.” An anti-commercial architect, by contrast, must depend on selling his creation to investors and tycoons.

The upside is that Mr. Soleri’s theories about pollution, waste, energy depletion — all the plagues listed on the poster — have never been more compelling in the marketplace of ideas.

With the interminable recession, Mr. Kim said, “I think there are lots of Americans out there ready to simplify.”

He has coined his own Soleri-like catchphrase: “the banality of consumption.” And he has advanced Mr. Soleri’s ideas in a compilation, “Lean Linear City: Arterial Arcology,” just out from Cosanti Press. Perhaps, he said, the book will influence the cities rising from bare earth in India and China.

Nadia Begin, 41, an architect and planning coordinator at the project for almost 18 years, seemed to speak for the whole community when she said, “Arcosanti needs to be part of the conversation.”

Yet it’s hard to argue that this skeletal settlement represents the city of tomorrow, said Dennis Frenchman, 63, who has created large-scale developments in South Korea, China and Spain, and is a professor of urban design and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mr. Frenchman expressed amazement at the beauty and intricacy of Mr. Soleri’s drawings, and the boldness of his invention. But “I don’t think it’s taken seriously as an urban model,” he said. “It’s really a historical curiosity” — a place whose beautiful handicrafts and Utopian spirit recall a Shaker village. The Shakers, he noted, have their furniture, the Arconauts have their bells.

Arcosanti is like a Shaker village in one other regard: the community has never bloomed with children. At last count, the number was four.

Ms. Begin gave birth to two sons at home, in her arresting apartment above the bronze foundry, where the slanting silt-cast walls create a kind of sunken space capsule with porthole windows and skylights.

But Mr. Soleri, the master of frugality, didn’t design a lot of spacious three-bedroom units. Which explains why Ms. Begin and her husband sleep next to a crib that holds their 4-year-old son.

ARCOSANTI needs children. And new living quarters. And working greenhouses. And people to plant them. Above all, this bulwark against modern capital needs money.

Just about everyone is hoping that Mr. Stein, with his management experience and professional network, will be able to revitalize Arcosanti. At Taliesin West, another countercultural colony with quirky buildings to maintain and tourists to serve, the succession process has dragged on for more than 50 years, since Frank Lloyd Wright’s death in 1959.

Jeffrey Grip, 64, a management consultant who is the chairman of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation board, laid out the options for a place like Arcosanti. “You can become essentially a museum: preserve and display what was created there,” Mr. Grip said. “Or you can become an educational foundation that furthers the works” of a great architect. A third path, he said, is to hope that a new mission will metamorphose in the chrysalis of the magical buildings.

If that future doesn’t materialize, what’s the worst-case scenario for Arcosanti?

“You’re looking at it,” Mr. Stein said.

His quip is less pessimistic than it may seem. Everything here is paid for, he said. “We don’t have a mortgage.” So even in its current state, Arcosanti must be more practical than the 460,000 housing units sitting empty in Arizona, according to recent census data.

Let’s say that the shuttered bakery in the Crafts III building never reopens in a renovated form — one of Mr. Stein’s priorities. Instead, it continues to be a gathering spot where Ms. Connaughton, the ceramist, meets friends after dinner. She likes to bake treats for visitors and tourists: giant sheets of lemon bars and peanut butter cookies.

On a recent night, a half-dozen friends joined her there, clustering around the warmth of the commercial oven. A few students from the Kansas City Art Institute, here for a two-week residency, were finishing sketches they had begun that morning. Their professor, who lived at Arcosanti in the 1970s, recalled bacchanals at the Construction Camp. Something about a nude public bath and an indoor bonfire.

A few decades removed from those madcap days, the youth of Arcosanti have graduated to a never-ending game of Othello. It took this happy crowd two hours to finish a six-pack. Ms. Connaughton spooned out another batch of cookies while Anita Carter, June Cash’s sister, crooned over the boombox. When the evening wound down, home was just downstairs.

For decades now, visitors have asked what it would take to finish Arcosanti. Maybe it’s time for a different question. Why doesn’t everyone choose to live this way?