Once again, friends, here to save the world from bad writing and worse ideas, Stephen Zacks. This time, our intrepid observer hung out at the New Museum and listened to some talking — about Red Lines, Death Vows, Foreclosures, and Risk Structures. Take it away!

A series of beautifully packaged and edited books published by the New Museum in the late eighties, Documentary Sources in Contemporary Culture, were responsible for turning me on to a lot of essential late 20th century ideas that I only half understood, were in many cases wrong, and took me more than a decade to get over. But the world of aesthetic and cultural engagement revealed in those books had a huge influence on me, and when the New Museum reopened in this sparkling, imperfect building on the Bowery, I hoped it would bring back these kinds of interdisciplinary conversations that helped generate so much excitement about ideas, culture, art, and urbanism at the time. In my imagination, the discussions would necessarily involve art stars and pop stars and intellectual superstars similar to the sort that those books first introduced me to: people like Michel Foucault (an incredibly original historian whose ideas were mostly wrong), Gilles Deleuze (a talented philosopher who when paired with Felix Guattari became an atrociously bad writer), heroes of postcolonial criticism like Edward Said, James Clifford, and Trinh T. Minh Ha, artists like Joseph Beuys, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Laurie Anderson, rappers and graffiti writers, and art and cultural critics like Greil Marcus, Rosalyn Deutsche, Laura Mulvey, and Jonathan Crary.

To my surprise, last Saturday I encountered a similar energy at the New Museum not through superstars but through the work of a homegrown designer and activist I have known for nearly ten years. In the past year, Damon Rich, founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy, has taken an enormous leap from local teacher, designer, artist, and activist into the world of political administration as urban designer and waterfront planner for the city of Newark. The clarity of thought and facility with ideas that the shift—along with a couple of years as a research fellow at Harvard and MIT— has brought him were impressively on display during a presentation alongside Lize Mogul, co-editor of An Atlas of Radical Geography and Nato Thompson, curator of the traveling “Experimental Geography” exhibit. It was a great continuation of the conversations that New Museum founder Marcia Tucker brought to the art world more than two decades ago.

The discussion ranged from works of art and objects of design whose putative political importance are premised on the idea that an aesthetic object can have a transformative effect on consciousness—an idea that has been true historically and could happen again but in practice is garbage most of the time—to the kinds of artfully wonkish documentation of municipal planning policies for which he is becoming famous. The core of Rich’s presentation concerned “Red Lines, Death Vows, Foreclosures, Risk Structures: Architectures of Finance from the Great Depression to the Subprime Meltdown,” his perfectly timed exhibition at MIT last winter in collaboration with CUP about the role of financial practices in creating and destroying communities.

Gone, at least in this presentation, was some of the ideological inflexibility that I have sometimes found fault with in the past. As an advocate for under-represented groups, Rich was accustomed to speaking to audiences that were likely to agree in advance with everything he might say. As a result he often failed to challenge audiences by affirming the possible benefits of economic development and seemed to take for granted that the motivations of developers and politicians could be easily dismissed. But as a political figure in Newark, any success he will have on the waterfront will probably depend on the participation of developers: he is currently surveying the area looking for places where eminent domain could potentially be used to reclaim the postindustrial landscape, no doubt for some combination of redevelopment and public access.

But I was most impressed by Rich’s ability to clearly and accurately place the different fields in which he operates in their proper contexts. As someone who is simultaneously doing work with K-12 schools, community groups, colleges, art galleries and museums, Ivy League universities, and now political bureaucracies, he’s well positioned to develop a fairly comprehensive appreciation for the value and the limits of various cultural and political practices. It makes his work in many ways the perfect antidote to the failures of postmodernism, which was often content with the rhetoric of “detournement” and aesthetic representations of resistance rather than producing demonstrable consequences through concrete actions. But ideas do matter, as Rich points out, and all the better if concrete actions are not only politically effective and economically sound but informed by egalitarian principles and concern for social justice. It will be fascinating to find out what he can accomplish in Newark and how it will be different from existing models, especially after the collapse of the financial infrastructure that his research came pretty close to predicting.