Lucy Lippard's T
he Lure of the Local is a swan song to the hybridity of place - temporal and spatial, personal and political, geographical and psychological, lived and imagined, insiders and outsiders - and to the ways in which art, particularly public art, can mediate place's connections between land, history, and culture. For Lippard, lived experience is central to the construction of place, as are the accumulated sedimentations of experience, memories, and connections in a place. If space is a memoryless landscape, place is a landscape mediated by human experience.
In an increasingly globalized world, for Lucy Lippard, the "lure of the local" is
the pull of place that operates on each of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies. It is the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to a prevailing alienation. The lure of the local is that undertone to modern life that connects it to the past we know so little and the future we are aimlessly concocting.
