Glimpses of beauty

Born in Michigan, raised in Lagos and educated in London and New York, Teju Cole is about as cosmopolitan as they come. In an interview with the American writer Aleksandar Hemon, republished in Known and Strange Things, he declares that ‘cities are our greatest invention. They drive creativity, they help us manage resources, and they can be hives of tolerance.’ Cole, whose PEN/Hemingway award-winning novel Open City (2012) was a paean to the vitality of urban sprawl, is an art historian by training; the essays and reviews in this collection — gathered from several years of writing for publications including the New York Times and the New Yorker — reveal a sensibility palpably influenced by the genre of writing known as psychogeography, blending touristic observation with social historical insights.

Where art historians once fretted over the implications of mechanical reproduction, they now agonise over digital superabundance. Noting (in 2012) that ‘380 billion photos were taken in 2011, and about ten per cent of all the photographs currently in existence were taken in 2012’, Cole is disparaging about the contemporary mania for compulsive snapping. He invokes the Russian word poshlost — meaning, approximately, false emotion or specious nostalgia — to characterise the trend for digitally altering photographs with apps like Instagram.

Yet he acknowledges, too, the creative possibilities opened up by the new technologies, notably in reviews of Mishka Henner’s No Man’s Land, an exhibition comprising images of sex workers in rural Italian locations gleaned from Google Street View, and Erik Kessels’s 24 Hrs of Photos, in which the artist downloaded every photograph uploaded to Flickr in the course of a single day, printed 350,000 of them and piled them up in a heap. For all their cursory banality, Cole insists that such works bear the hallmarks of true art: ‘The exasperation, the sense of wonder or inundation, the glimpses of beauty.