Ruin porn?

I was taken aback recently to be told by Arts & Letters Daily that my fascination with urban decay, as photographed by people like Jose Gaytan and Nathan Kensinger, means that I am indulging in “ruin porn”—or, as the linked article calls it, ”economic disaster porn.”

According to Noreen Malone, “photosets of blighted places have been, and were described variously as wonderful, as beautiful, as stunning, as shocking, as sad. They are all of those things, and so I suppose they are good art. But they are rotten photojournalism.”

True, I suppose. But then, that’s not what they were intended to be. And even if they are not intended to generate help for devastated areas, I think they do dramatize the devastation. At any rate, I doubt they are doing any actual harm. I find it hard to picture anyone actually impeding economic aid and development because he likes the way the light falls through a collapsed roof, or the colors of the giant gas bubbles rising up in the Gowanus Canal.

Did Piranesi worry about this? Or Shelley, contemplating those vast and trunkless legs of stone? Or the other romantic poets as they mooned around the Roman Forum and Colosseum? Perhaps there’s a statute of limitations, and it becomes okay to enjoy ruins once the people who lived in them have been gone for a certain length of time.