One of Hyperallergic's Top Ten Art Books for 2021 Approximately 300
daily and weekly newspapers flourished in New York before the Civil
War. A majority of these newspapers, even those that proclaimed
independence of party, were motivated by political conviction and
often local conflicts. Their editors and writers jockeyed for
government office and influence. Political infighting and their
related maneuvers dominated the popular press, and these political
and economic agendas led in turn to exploitation of art and art
exhibitions. Humbug traces the relationships, class animosities,
gender biases, and racial projections that drove the terms of art
criticism, from the emergence of the penny press to the Civil War.
The inexpensive "penny" papers that appeared in the 1830s relied on
advertising to survive. Sensational stories, satire, and breaking
news were the key to selling papers on the streets. Coverage of
local politicians, markets, crime, and personalities, including
artists and art exhibitions, became the penny papers' lifeblood.
These cheap papers, though unquestionably part of the period's
expanding capitalist economy, offered socialists, working-class
men, bohemians, and utopianists a forum in which they could propose
new models for American art and society and tear down existing
ones. Arguing that the politics of the antebellum press affected
the meaning of American art in ways that have gone unrecognized,
Humbug covers the changing politics and rhetoric of this criticism.
Author Wendy Katz demonstrates how the penny press's drive for a
more egalitarian society affected the taste and values that shaped
art, and how the politics of their art criticism changed under
pressure from nativists, abolitionists, and expansionists. Chapters
explore James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald and its attack on
aristocratic monopolies on art; the penny press's attack on the
American Art-Union, an influential corporation whose Board
purchased artworks from living artists, exhibited them in a free
gallery, and then distributed them in an annual five-dollar
lottery; exposes of the fraudulent trade in Old Masters works; and
the efforts of socialists, freethinkers, and bohemians to reject
the authority of the past.
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