Dean MacCannell is a cultural critic, a professor of landscape architecture, and vice-chair of the geography graduate program at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976) and Empty Meeting Grounds (1992). He has written on architecture, film noir, homelessness, public art, and urban design and has worked extensively as an advisor to museums, cultural producers, and documentary filmmakers. His prescient book has been particularly relevant throughout the discussions surrounding Downtime.
Joseph del Pesco: What is the "leisure class" you refer to in The Tourist?
Dean MacCannell: The leisure class used to have a very specific kind of designation. You could draw demographic boundaries around it. I think I parody it a little bit in The Tourist when I talk about people who sit for portraiture, attend live music presentations, and breed dogs. In other words there was a very distinct leisure class probably until World War I. Today, some of the symbolism of the leisure class has been broken up. Now, we have the idling classes, we have homeless people who might be the ultimate leisure class. Some of the classes that used to be considered the leisure class are probably as beleaguered and overworked as any group of people is today. So, there has been a dramatic redistribution of leisure across the demographic spectrum, but I think as this is happening people increasingly seize upon what they do in their leisure time, or what you are calling "downtime," as being the most important thing in their lives. Rather than from their work or even their families, they get their sense of identity from the kinds of pursuits that they engage in when they are not at work. There is a fixation on identity formation and self-development—people try to become who they want to be through their leisure activities.
JdP: Also in The Tourist, you describe the leisure class as having very specific traits, such as a willingness to accept and even venerate the positive and negative aspects of cultural history equally. Have your ideas about the leisure class changed since you wrote the book?
DM: When I wrote The Tourist the kind of tourism that I was looking at was international sightseeing, which was a mostly do-it-yourself activity. People would still occasionally employ the aid of a travel agent and there has always been the phenomenon of the package tour, but it was only a marginal part of the tourism business in 1975. Increasingly today we see the amusement park and the tourist vacations, Hard Rock Cafes, and the transformation of museums from places of learning to places where you go to have a leisure experience. There has been this aggressive move of capital into the leisure space, and to me that is the biggest change that I have watched over the last 30 years since the publication. As far as the people are concerned, I do not think that there has been much of a change in the human desire to experience something new. People are not necessarily satisfied by the prepackaged, pseudonew experience.
JdP: One of the discussions in our group has involved trying to sort out the difference between leisure and tourism. What is your perspective on this?
DM: We can oversimplify it and say that there are two ways of filling downtime. One of them is an active desire to have new kinds of experiences, to see more parts of the world, to get out and do something you have never done before. That would be essentially a work ethic–based use of leisure time. The other thing that is done during the same gaps is that you do nothing. You just go flop on a beach, drink Mai-Tais, and work on your tan. So, I would say that is the major divide; obviously there are specialized subactivities within those. Then, there are cases of bodybuilding for example, where you are working very hard. Just because they happen to take the same kind of available time away from work does not necessarily mean that they are very similar activities. I think of them as being quite different from each other. However, any given itinerary can include both types. You might find someone who visits all the churches in southern Spain, but spends four or five days on the beach in the middle of doing that. The way that you experience them, the way you will talk about them and integrate the experiences into your life, are very different given those two major differences within the framework of what we group together as leisure activity. I have observed tourists working much harder at their leisure activity, at being a tourist, than they ever would at work. With all the physical effort, organization, and deprivation that goes into these experiences.
JdP: You mention at one point in your book that entire cities and regions have become aware of themselves as tourist attractions. This has also become the case with large-scale art institutions, which mount blockbuster exhibitions, for example. How does this kind of self-awareness relate to the construction of a museum as leisure/tourism site?
DM: One of the main things that has happened has been the emergence not only of the blockbuster exhibition but the appearance of the blockbuster gallery itself. It started with Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim in New York, but now, with the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles by Frank Gehry, what we are seeing is that it's not enough for the museum to have a great exhibition but that the museum itself is becoming a primary tourist attraction. So, it is extending the walls for the tourist experience to such an extent that you don't even need to go in. The other thing that I see happening, and I regard this as a positive tendency, is that museums are increasingly taking responsibility for a whole range of activities happening outside and near the museum to create awareness. There is more outreach on the part of the museum in terms of being able to schedule and curate and take responsibility of the experience beyond the museum walls. I think that artists and curators are better equipped to provide a vision of the region that is more intriguing than tour guides and administrators have been able to. This is some of the most important work that is happening given the current importance of tourism as one of the world's core economic engines. I'm interested in anybody who is trying to figure out how to pull it back from the jaws of big capital and put it back in the hands of the people.
JdP: Two curators, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru, describe how cities' social environments are monopolized by capitalism, and the populace are "socialized" as mere consumers. According to their thinking this creates an "indirect, invisible, and almost comfortable kind of censorship and a deliberate reduction of art spaces" in favor of commercial activity. How do you think this rise in capitalism you mentioned earlier has affected potential sites of leisure?
DM: I do not think that it's coming from the consumer, I think it's coming from a particular way that tourism, at the regional level, is being theorized by planners. Basically, I agree with the Obrist/Hanru assessment of the situation. Planners have this idea that the money is out there in the suburbs, and the people who live in the suburbs are fearful of cities and do not want to have the full urban experience, but they want to be tourists, so the idea is to try to bring them into a restricted and controlled environment. Their justification has to do with a response to the psyche of a certain kind of suburban tourist, but the point is that it ends up being a very self-serving economic model. What they want to do is to focus and control the economics of local tourism development and to set districts into particular formulaic sets, so they can charge admission. This is an unfortunate turn of events because I've never met a tourist—suburban or otherwise—who is actually driven away by the fear of the unknown. In fact I think they are driven by the desire to experience the unknown, and most of them do. Some might say [in San Francisco] can I really go into the Mission? Do I dare go to Little Italy? What they are really seeking is the most mild level of reassurance, so I say "Yes, it's fine, nothing is going to happen to you, have a good time," and they come back delighted that they have overcome whatever concerns they had. The shift of thinking on the part of the planners is not a real basis for building up the tourist sector, but it is the theory on which most tourism development is using at present. I think it is cynically trying to make sure that the tourism money stays in particular neighborhoods and goes to particular establishments.
JdP: You mentioned during our last meeting that the Haight-Ashbury district has become a target for a potential leisure site and tourist construction.
DM: In the 1960s, it was a revolutionary pride that if a chain would move into the neighborhood it would be smashed. Now there are planners with strange schemes. They wanted to get all the hippies out of the Haight-Ashbury and move them up to Mendocino, where they would be happy, and hire actors to dress up like hippies to walk around—effectively turning it into a kind of Plymoth Plantation, a historical-type theme park. This is part of capitalism looking at tourism.
I think the whole impulse of tourism and sightseeing is exactly the opposite—you want to get off the grid. When asked, "Why do you travel?" the French author Stendhal said, "to have something new to say." You don't have anything to say if everything is prepackaged. Sometimes these artificial attractions rise to the level of having their own kind of authenticity like Las Vegas or San Francisco's Chinatown. People don't realize that the decorative motifs on Grant Street [in San Francisco's Chinatown] were originally made for a movie that was shot there. When the moviemaker came to shoot on location, the producers didn't think the authentic Chinatown looked good enough. So, they put up the gate, the telephone booths, and other affectations that have now become the authentic symbols of Chinatown.
(Interview conducted February 3, 2005. Transcribed by Cecilia Foote)