Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America by Neil Harris

Abstract

Book Reviews Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modem America. By Neil Harris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Pp. viii + 453; illustrations, notes, index. $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). In this collection of essays, which date from 1972 through 1987, Neil Harris reminds us of his extraordinary reach as a historian. Much of his most seminal thinking has resulted in essays and speeches that have not been easily accessible to students and scholars of American history. This book remedies the problem. It is arranged in three loosely organized parts. The first part generally sets forth a strategy for approaching the history of cultural institutions in Amer­ ica. While others have looked at specific cities, or individual institu­ tions, or categories of institutions, Harris links the emergence of museums—and especially art museums—in 19th-century America to a broad context of cultural responses to a rapidly changing urban environment. In the perspective he brings to bear, he eschews the Whiggish judgmentalism that has distorted many museum histories. These essays set out a much richer and more holistic frame of reference from which to look at the emergent processes of museums as important urban institutions in the last half of the 19th century. Included in this framework are museum connections to related commercial developments such as retail merchandising and the dramatic influence of world’s fairs in shaping the aspirations of American cultural and urban leadership. While some of the material appears dated, what is of greater issue is that more historians have not followed Harris’s lead in this area. The history of cultural institutions remains a rich field for which Harris has provided important guideposts . The second section is a potpourri of essays held together by the general theme of “the boundaries and interactions of culture and media.” One topic explored is the role of mass media as an innovation that challenged existing culture and provided a new mediating power in American life. Two essays stand out in their prescience. “Heroism and Copyright in an Age of Mass Culture” is a tour de force that explores the dualism of public access and private property as it relates to Superman as both folk hero and cultural property. “The Drama of Consumer Desire” provides a pioneering look at how consumerist ideology, with its supporting innovations of advertising and branding, was absorbed into America’s imaginative vocabulary; “the world of Permission to reprint a review from this section may be obtained only from the reviewer. 410 TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 411 objects is no longer accessory, adjunct, scene-setting,” but has become instead a primary shaper of personality and value. Here again, Harris has set out new ground that surprisingly few historians have bothered to plow. The third section of Cultural Excursions deals with the social history of art and architecture. It is this general area that will be of most direct interest to historians of technology. In “Iconography and Intellectual History,” Harris sets out a series of problems for historians trying to sort out and analyze the uneasy growth of a visual culture within the traditions of verbal culture. He argues for a recognition of the need for an “aggressive juxtaposition” of various historical disciplines in order to confront this new technological phenomenon. He uses as a model the coming of the halftone process, a technological innovation that raised a whole new set of issues relating to authorship and authority. To help place such innovations into their cultural settings, Harris calls for an enlarged role for technological history: They were technologically complex and confusing in detail. Assessment of their significance requires some absorption, not in the grand tradition of scientific theorizing, which historians of science do so well, but in minor, mundane, mechanical tinkering, bitterly disputed and often not explained with any degree of thoroughness. Since the history of technology in general has not formed a part of the usual training of American intellectual historians but has remained in limbo as a semi-independent field of specialization, the vocabulary and interests necessary to inte­ grate this praxis with the history of thought are not widely available. Joining iconography and intellectual history, for recent American history, requires...