``Give the people what they want'': The American aesthetic movement, art worlds, and consumer culture, 1876--1890
Abstract
This dissertation examines the cultural politics of the American Aesthetic movement in terms of the increasing professionalization of the New York art world and the expanding consumer marketplace. A self-consciously meliorist and didactic movement grounded in the belief that a 'beautiful' environment could promote moral and social change, Aestheticism played a significant and complex role in the transformation of late nineteenth-century American culture and ideologies. Revealing the relationships between artistic design, social reform, and consumption through a close analysis of myriad 'fine' and 'popular' visual and textual materials, I explore the layered meanings of Aestheticism as a progressive and nostalgic impulse that both critiqued and reinforced the dominant social order. By understanding consumption as a rich cultural enterprise central to the dual processes of class identity and lifestyle formation, the study argues that American Aestheticism's particular language of reform made it readily adaptable to the nascent consumer ethos, a development that not only generated widespread popularity but, ultimately, decline. ^
Subject Area
American Studies|History, United States|Art History
Recommended Citation
Sylvia L Yount,
"``Give the people what they want'': The American aesthetic movement, art worlds, and consumer culture, 1876--1890"
(January 1, 1995).
Dissertations available from ProQuest.
Paper AAI9543159.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI9543159
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