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# No Mag Is an Island
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/no-mag-is-an-island/
- Published: 2014-04-17T16:57:02.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:00:49.000Z
- Description: In the latest issue of Cluster Mag, a "magazine of international popular culture," writer Jesse Myerson places the asset-stripping drama surrounding Detroit's bankruptcy against a broader historical context, one that dates to the 13th-century failure of Constantinople.
- Author: Mostafa Heddaya
- Tags: Opinion, Detroit Institute of Arts, Islands, Jacolby Satterwhite, Staten Island, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:03 (2014, 2015, part 1)

![satterwhite](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/04/satterwhite.jpg)

Still from Jacolby Satterwhite, “Reifying Desire 6: Island of Treasure” (2013) at the 2014 Whitney Biennial (image courtesy Cluster Mag)

In the [latest issue](http://theclustermag.com/issue-5/?ref=hyperallergic.com) of *Cluster Mag*, a “magazine of international popular culture,” writer Jesse Myerson places the asset-stripping drama surrounding Detroit’s bankruptcy against a broader historical context, one that dates to the 13th-century failure of Constantinople. Taking as its launching point the widely circulated [November 2013 proclamation](http://hyperallergic.com/95705/detroit-creditors-file-in-court-to-push-for-dia-art-sale/) that “art is not an essential asset” (uttered on behalf of the Financial Guaranty Insurance Co., a major Detroit creditor last seen [organizing a $2 billion offer for the Detroit Institute of Arts’ collection](https://hyperallergic.com/detroit-creditor-offers-bid-for-museum-art/)), the article presents the specter of municipal bankruptcy as encoded within the “modern financial system,” one with roots in Venice and its financing of the Crusades. “Venice,” Myerson writes,

> could be considered the ultimate ruthless creditor, and in the summer of 1204 it transformed the largest, wealthiest, best-fortified city in the Western world, Constantinople, then the seat of the Byzantine Empire, into a smoldering wasteland. It was abandoned by 90 percent of its population, stripped of its assets, and vanquished as a world power in the pursuit of debt service.

What follows is a detailed and fluent account of the financial politics underlying the fall of Constantinople, a narrative that wends its way to Detroit’s contemporary “nihilism of debt.” The piece is an engaging exercise in historical accounting, and it fits well into this fifth edition of *Cluster Mag*, on the theme of “Islands.” The surrounding material is uniformly intriguing, ranging from an interviews-based profile of Staten Island (New York’s “last gold coast”) by Natalia Linares and Wills Glasspiegel to a smartly elliptical profile of artist Jacolby Satterwhite by Andrew Durbin (at one point Satterwhite’s “island-making practice” is linked to Durbin’s annual [Shamrock Shake](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamrock%5FShake?ref=hyperallergic.com) habit).

*The fifth issue of* [Cluster](http://theclustermag.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com)*, edited by Giampaolo Bianconi, Michelle Lhooq, Jesse Myerson, Molly Osberg, and Max Pearl, is available for download as a PDF* [*here*](http://theclustermag.com/issue-5/?ref=hyperallergic.com)*; individual articles will be posted online in the coming weeks.*