But this persistent conversion of the informality of urban subcultures into the formality of a cultural establishment reveals an important lesson. What the authors trace is the formation of what has been pessimistically called the culture industry. New York establishes a critical mass of producers and consumers, the avant-garde and its audience. The avant-garde melds with other forms of leisure and entertainment. Metaphors for New York are highly ambiguous.
Coney Island is that electrified urban bacchanal promising the anarchic pleasures that art craves.
But it is also a commercial entertainment. New York's towering skyline promises a sublime future, the triumph of technology over nature. But this skyline also represents capital itself. This ambiguity traps the authors themselves. By the 1960s the notion of fine art, with all its upper-class connotations, had become an anachronism in New York''.