Commodity aesthetics: The industrial exhibitions of Paris, 1834—1844, reviewed

Abstract

The industrial exhibitions in Paris during the July Monarchy drew large crowds and broad coverage in the press. Reviews of these exhibitions frequently appeared in newspapers that covered the annual art Salons, and often in the same part of the publication — in the feuilleton space. Thus an aesthetic of the commodity emerges in the reviews of the industrial exhibitions, as readers were taught to view the objects produced by industry with the same eye that assessed the value of new works of art. This essay concerns the contours of this aesthetic and how reviewers produced interest in these objects on display. Coverage of these exhibitions reveals the dominance of progress as an organizing paradigm for the historical consciousness in the early nineteenth century. Yet, at the same time, counterbalancing such a valuation of progress, objects are often represented as connected to or evocative of a lost pre-Revolutionary past.