Satellite Dishes, a Creative Incubator, and the Displacement of Aesthetics in Amsterdam

Abstract

This chapter examines an aesthetic clash in the neighbourhood of Bos en Lommer in Amsterdam. One side of the street features decorated satellite dishes attached to social housing, which constitutes a battleground for otherness. Such dishes are broadly opposed in Dutch public and institutional discourse for being “ugly,” which amounts to xenophobia expressed in aesthetic terms. Opposite is a disused school building recently converted to an art-space-cum-hostel called WOW Amsterdam, a “creative incubator” that injects aesthetic difference and thereby the politics of gentrification into the area through foregrounding art, fashion and consumption. I argue that this clash shows how aesthetics are politics, and that the newly-inserted global gentrification aesthetic – following the creative incubator formula – displaces the aesthetics, and politics, of the battle for otherness across the street.