Art and the Aesthetics of Cultural Gentrification: The Cases of Boyle Heights and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles

The art world has been linked to gentrification. Such art is associated with a modernist aesthetics based on abstraction, individual experience, and exchange value. This chapter identifies a different kind of art based on an aesthetics of engagement in the historic immigrant neighbourhoods of Boyle Heights and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. This aesthetics is linked to ethics, collective interaction, and the participatory community development of specific places. Furthermore, gentrification is often only understood as an economic process. The concept of cultural gentrification is presented to demonstrate how transformations in the symbolic sphere can trigger a loss of belonging. Art that is borne from the specific culture of a place, however, can open up new potential in combating gentrification.