On 3 December 2013, a federal judge approved the bankruptcy filing for Detroit, MI, the largest municipality to seek such protection in US history. The bankruptcy forced those overseeing the city to determine the economic value of Detroit’s assets, including the art collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts. These efforts led to debates over the moral commitments to art, on the one hand, and paying the city’s debts, including pensions owned to retired city workers, on the other. We analyze newspaper coverage of this situation from US newspapers as well as Detroit Free Press between 1 January 2013 and 31 January 2014 to investigate how these moral commitments became moral orders during an economic crisis that has been argued is symptomatic of neoliberalism.
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