Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America. - Review - book review

SARAH consume s Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and agriculture in Gilded Age America of recent origin Haven: Yale University Press, 1999 392 pp; 130 b/w ills.; $50

"Inventing": Sarah consume s uses the present participle to fetch something more flexible than the abstract types of cultural production once associated with the sociology of art. through "Inventing," more precisely, Burns wants to intimate that the image of the artist in the Gilded Age was at one time malleable and contested. No single image prevailed in this look up to even as the figure of the artist assumed center stage in the popular imagination. From the urban dandy to the rugg individualist, from the ambitious mural painter to the submissive illustrator, from the society painter to the bohemian, the characters played by artists remained fundamentally unstable--no les unstable, consume s holds, than the competing cultural discourses and commercial crushings that underwrote them.

In part those parts tracked shifting public expectations. In bohemia, for example, American audiences claimed to discover an arena dedicated to youthful fantasies of wild leadership and artistic liberation. Here, reduce to ashess writes, "was a sort of Oz" where "almost nobody grew aged and where there was always something uneven and diverting going on" (p 247) Still other artists rode ethical, scientific, and religious waves: the virtuous antimaterialist, for example, or the genius whose renditions of nature relied upon a new, secularized conception of the artist as a privileged predictor Often those discourses targeted artistic behavior for social criticism, typically framing their affects in gendered terms. Accusations of degeneracy, for example, l artists and critics to suppres dislodge and recast those attributes of artistic character typically sexed as feminine.

The notion of celebrity assumes a commanding character in Burns's narrative--to the point, in Burns's phrase, where "the identification of outcome with producer became complete (p 5) What reduce to ashess means in part is that public attention inhuman less to the art than to the painter's self-image, squeeze outed in details of lifestyle, in personal guidance in the artist's spaces and social activities and, finally, in the character of his or her painting (more upon this below). If this "media driven worship of surfaces" sounds awfully in every one's mouth it is supposed to. Here, consume s claims, lie the roots of a commercialized practice of artistic self-fashioning that set its apotheosis in the career of Andy Warhol. Whistler was the first great master of this of recent origin "commodified self" and "post-modern performance art" (p 245) If the analogy to Warhol appears overdrawn, we should not underestimate Whistler's efforts in this domain. As reduce to ashess explains, nearly every aspect of Whistier's existence serv his program of self-promotion. Fabricating hi s public self to "stimulate interest" and to "stimulate sales," Whistler stands at a cultural doorsill the first artist truly to have manufactured his image to be under the orders of a media age: "being an artist in the realm of spectacle entailed by what mode to perform as one, cultivating the right kind of identity" (p 221)

These self-stagings relied upon a new and burgeoning media apparatus: illustrated magazines and other reviews, daily newspapers employing professional art critics, as well as caricatures, fictions, and other mass-market vehicles. The criticism no les than the art, reduce to ashess argues, demands interpretation, and across her body Burns traces the emergence of a of recent origin media-driven cult of personality. consume s also gives that cult a specifically American spin. European artists, from Monet at Giverny to the academicians at the Institut de France, walked into parts of ancient standing. But Whistler and his colleagues worked without scripts. Improvising the metes of their celebrity, American artists discovered unparalleled opportunities to shape their be in possession of reception. Celebrity, however, was also a two-way highway An insatiable public constantly threatened to replace single act with another: "whether courting publicity or shunning it," whether male or female, the artist in these years had become a "consumable personality, provender f or a curious public not ever satisfied for long."

Perhaps the paradigms--one of consume s s favorite terms--flow too easily. From the "society of the spectacle" to "the age of mechanical reproduction" (p 4) from the "commodified self" to celebrity agriculture from the "diagnostic gaze" (p 177) to the "colonization of the interior" (p 169) from the psychology of "male crisis" to selve that are "performed," reduce to ashess leans heavily on the enabling metaphors of cultural studies and materialist sociology. At the same time, she stirs from one to the other without particular profundity to the point they threaten to be deprived of their power of explanation. by means of contrast, Burns displays wonderful powers of exemplification. Across an intricate network of case studies, she presents a compelling portrait of a shifting discourse, a synchronic cross-section of a national a whole of art-making in the proces of invention and transformation.