Portraying the global financial crisis : myth, aesthetics and the city

Meissner, Miriam (2012) Portraying the global financial crisis : myth, aesthetics and the city. NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, 1 (1). ISSN 2213-0217

Abstract

This article examines the role of urban imaginaries in filmic and photographic portrayals of the financial crisis of 2008. It develops Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes’ concepts of myth as tools of narrative and aesthetic analysis to show how, via their use of urban imaginaries, contemporary crisis film and photography indicate, interrelate, and render iconographic key inconsistencies that mark popular ways of interpreting the 2008 financial crisis. In particular, the article analyses imaginaries of architectural geometries, skyscraper aesthetics and corporate glass facades in popular crisis visualizations. The article concludes by questioning the political implications of these forms of crisis portrayal. It proposes to read urban imaginaries in crisis portrayals as symptoms of a crisis in contemporary economic thought and cultural/media representation. Therefore, urban imaginaries can be taken as points of departure for a critical discourse analysis of financial crisis media coverage.