Word: tourists
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Besides, culture is business. Serious business. The splendid offerings of New York City, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the New York City Ballet, generate more than $2 billion a year in tourist revenue. Not-for-profit arts, local and national, support 1.3 million jobs, yield $37 billion a year in economic activity and return $3.4 billion a year to the federal treasury through tax--some 20 times the budget of the nea. It is ludicrous to pretend that the NEA is a drain on the American purse...
...Ponte de Paglia groans under the weight of Japanese, Germans, Americans, Frenchmen, Scots, English, Indians, Spaniards, Scandinavians--the whole world milling about in T shirts, polyglotting. It takes five minutes for a pedestrian to push across the bridge, a distance of 30 yds. Venice vanished centuries ago into its tourist shop-museum self, forfeit to the ever flattening demographics of mass tourism...
...soul of the person photographed. The sacred place (Mount Sinai, Mount Fuji, the Grand Canyon) is an onion, and each new wave of Visigoths with video cameras peels away a layer of mystique, until the magic that drew the stranger in the first place is gone, and instead the tourist finds--other tourists. And with them, the hotels and fast foods and souvenirs and globally identical amenities. A real traveler hates all that...
...inevitable that tourists corrupt the places they visit? Probably. But wait: maybe we could turn it around. Make tourism a moral force, a technique for civilizing war zones, for example. In Papua New Guinea, tribes firing arrows at one another across an unpaved track through the forest have been known to break off hostilities to allow a tourist bus to pass...
Would not Bosnia--I hear it's lovely this time of year--profit if tens of thousands of tourists were to descend with dollars and cameras? Would the Heisenberg gaze of strangers shame the ethnic purifiers and spoil the snipers' aim? Would commercialism defeat tribalism? Or maybe Disney could take over the war and give the fighters blanks and dummy mortar shells to fire: they would enact their hatreds daily as a permanent tourist attraction...