Time, they often say in New York, is money. This can also mean that money is what time is like. Money, being purely quantitative, has no content, but can be exchanged for content: its purchases. The same has become true of time: it, too, is now being exchanged for the content it lacks. Work-time for wages, wages for the unlived time “encapsulated” in the purchase: the “speed” of the automobile, the eternal present of the television screen, the time “saved” in a hundred household appliances, the peace of the retirement pension to come, etc. etc. The fourth lesson of the city is pie in the sky, in which the denial of space and time combine.
From John Berger’s Ralph Fasanella and the City, collected in About Looking.
More about Fasanella here and here. This is Fasanella’s 1959 painting, New York City:
