Magazine Features Research Articles

Collecting as an Art

Collecting as an Art Kevin Melchionne I Snob appeal and bad psychology have hindered understanding the aesthetics of collecting. Theorists have tended to see collecting as a form of conspicuous consumption or obsessive-compulsive behavior, leading them to dismiss the possibility of any aesthetic value in collecting. These views of collecting as consumerist and neurotic are shortsighted. After considering two highly visible examples of the standard approaches, I offer an alternative view of collecting as an art. For the critique of collecting as conspicuous consumption, consider, for instance, John Dewey, one of the earliest advocates of expanding our conception of art beyond the fine arts. 1 Despite his broad and inclusive conception of art, Dewey did not think collecting had any aesthetic value. He sought to redirect attention from the world of curators, critics, and collectors to an ordinary life infused with aesthetic experiences ranging from a “fire engine rushing by” to “the delight of the housewife in tending her plants” (p. 9). Given this outlook, it is surprising that Dewey dismissed the possibility of an aesthetics of collecting with the remark: “the typical collector is the typical capitalist” (p. 12). Dewey saw the pleasure of collecting as an “adventitious matter,” that “simulates aesthetic values” (p. 14). For Dewey, collecting is linked to the museum concept of art, according to which the work of art is raised above and segregated from everyday life. It is through the process of collecting that works of art end up in museums, mansions, [End Page 148] and warehouses. As the very means of this sequestration of art in our society, collecting seems at first glance to be no more than a symptom of the cult of the art object that Dewey was criticizing. Dewey does not object to the museum itself as much as he objects to the reduction of art to the objects and performances found in museums and concert halls, and aesthetic experience to the occasions engendered by them. The consequence of the museum concept of art is a separation of what Dewey terms the “artistic” and the “aesthetic.” By the artistic, Dewey means production, creativity and expression; by the aesthetic, he means consumption, appreciation and interpretation. We tend to see production or creation on the side of the professional artist; whereas the art-goer, or, for our purposes here, the collector, is the passive consumer of aesthetic experience. However, for Dewey, “the distinction between esthetic and artistic cannot be pressed so far as to become a separation” (p. 53). Though analytically distinguishable, the aesthetic and the artistic represent a unified process for Dewey. Creation and appreciation are two sides of a pragmatic-phenomenological whole. The awkward phrase “art as experience” unites doing and undergoing, creation and appreciation. 2 The fact that there is no standard term to capture the continuity of the aesthetic and the artistic illustrates how deeply entrenched the museum concept of art is in our habits of thought. Dewey’s rejection of the aesthetics of collecting may also be tied to his distaste for the elitism of high profile art and antiques collecting. Unlike his general theory of art, his vision of collecting was closely linked to the fine arts. While he must have marveled at the works that his friend, Albert Barnes, was assembling in his Merion, Pennsylvania mansion, Dewey probably also recognized that the collection was made possible by the patent medicine entrepreneur’s great fortune. Despite the ubiquity of beachcombing and tag sales, the association of affluence with collecting is deeply ingrained. Though collecting is common, public attention is directed toward the collections of the elite. Glossy antiques and interior decorating magazines feature priceless collections set in the sumptuous homes of the super-rich. Interest in collecting becomes voyeurism into the lives of those who collect the most expensive and admired objects. In return, the collectors are tacitly seen as the dedicated custodians of a common culture. Yet collecting is as common as spare change or a walk on the beach. While few people have the cash to drop on a Chippendale card table, collectors can be found among all classes of people. Children collect, though the old [End Page 149] cigar box has been...

Vietnam shadows: the war, its ghosts, and its legacy

Nearly a quarter-century after the fall of Saigon, the memory of America's defeat in continues to haunt the national psyche. In Shadows, former war correspondent Arnold Isaacs turns his reportorial eye to the conflict since Vietnam, covering the skirmishes and firefights of a cultural battle-some would say stalemate-that refuses to end. Isaacs takes on the popular myths and misconceptions about Vietnam-among them the mistaken belief that the U.S. military lacked clear goals. (In many conversations with U.S. officers in Vietnam, I do not recall discovering any who were in doubt about what they were supposed to do there.) He exposes the myth of the MIAs-a myth sustained not only by grieving relatives but also by professional con men of breathtaking cynicism-and shows how the many false MIA stories may nonetheless reveal a deeper truth: We lost something in and we want it back. Isaacs talks to the veterans unable to forget the war no one wanted to talk to them about. He explores the class divisions deepened by a conflict in which the privileged avoided service that an earlier generation had embraced as a duty. (691 Harvard alumni died in World War II, Isaacs points out; in Vietnam, nineteen.) And he shows how the Vietnam Syndrome continues to affect nearly every major U.S. foreign policy decision, from the Persian Gulf to Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti. Capturing the ironic legacies of a war that abounds in them, Isaacs introduces the new Americans-the Vietnamese, Thais, and Cambodians-who fled Indochina to settle in the U.S., where fashion spreads in the New York Times Magazine feature models photographed in Vietnamese settings wearing Indo-chic clothes that sell for four to five years' income for the average Vietnamese. (Farm girl's jacket in 'periwinkle blue' raw silk: 1,460 by Richard Tyler.) And he recounts the experiences of Americans who have returned to Vietnam, only to find their former enemies turned entrepreneurs-such as the operators of a popular Saigon bar called Apocalypse Now. Isaacs reports and writes for those whose lives were changed by the war and also for a generation that has come of age without memory of but who nonetheless feels its shadow in the country they soon will lead.

State Lines ed. by Ken Hammond

Reviews 365 State Lines. Compiled and Edited by Ken Hammond. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993. 223 pages, $29.50.) StateLines is a book about “places”— sometimes places on a map, but more often places in the mind, in the heart, in the imagination. Comprised of fiftytwo of the best short essays originally published in the “State Lines”feature of Texas Magazine, the Sunday supplement to the Houston Chronicle, the collection preserves and celebrates, in the words of essayist Thom Marshall, “long ago scenes and incidents that remain evergreen in the mind.” Selected for their ability to offer a “sense or feeling of sharing something personally held,” the essays range widely over the Texas landscape, taking for their settings the state’s wide open range, woodlands, bayous and coastline, and describing the struggles of the diverse peoples—Hispanic, white, black, young, middle-aged, and old— who have made their home in the Lone Star state. Within the collection’s pages, readers will find nostalgic vignettes of child­ hood paper routes and visits to the bookmobile, of delight in King Kong, dogs, fishing, and watching a semi-pro baseball game on a warm, small-town summer night. Yet theywill also encounter strikingly contemporary accounts ofsuffering and despair brought about by illiteracy, poverty, homelessness, alcoholism, aging, and death. Perhaps the finest essays reveal the poignant struggles of individual men and women seeking to realize their dreams. Rachel Herrera Reed, for example, recounts her father’s frustration in never learning to read, yet his ultimate “triumph” in hearing the newspaper read to him in his daughter’s voice. Ben Ezzell describes the successful efforts of an elderly black man and a small-town newspaper editor to save a black church destined for demolition as part of an “urban renewal”scheme. Supplemented by Rolf Laub’s illustrations, brief biographical sketches of the authors, and Leon Hale’s forward, “A Defense of the Essay,”which situates the essays in the tradition of Michel de Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and E. B. White, State Lines is a superb collection that should enjoy wide appeal among general readers. CHRISTOPHER S. BUSCH Hillsdale College Elmer Kelton Country: The Short Nonfiction of a Texas Novelist. By Elmer Kelton. (FortWorth: Texas Christian University Press, 1993. 312 pages. $25.00/$14.95.) For over forty-two years Elmer Kelton has worn two hats—agricultural journalist by day, writing mostly for the Livestock Weekly, and fiction writer by nights and on weekends, receiving five Spur Awards from Western Writers of America. Yet these hats, each with a distinctive West Texas crease, complement ...

Keepers of the Flame: The Role of Fire in American Culture, 1775–1925 by Margaret H. Hazen, Robert M. Hazen

194 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE explaining entire systems or useful objects that cannot be easily grasped. How valid are the thesis and method? One cannot but feel a lurking skepticism, if only because Petroski’s infinity of change is as inconceivable as the finiteness of Plato’s ideal table and chair. But if nothing else, Petroski reminds us not only to pay attention to the commonplace things of our culture but to look critically at how they perform their functions, and how the perception of that performance affects changes in forms. One shortcoming of this book for serious students is the bizarre style of documentation (which appears to be a trade-book fad): only direct quotations are documented, leaving many paraphrased pas­ sages untraceable. The bibliography is valuable; as any work on popular culture, it blends popular catalogs and magazine features with scholarly sources. Notably missing to my mind is George Kubler’s The Shape of Time (New Haven, Conn., 1962), where the alliterative principles of formal change are made much more complex by injecting rate of change into the formula, for in cultural history, it is sometimes as curious to explain why things do not change, as why they do. Fred E. H. Schroeder Dr. Schroeder teaches in the Department of Interdisciplinary Programs at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Keepers ofthe Flame: The Role ofFire in American Culture, 1775—1925. By Margaret H. Hazen and Robert M. Hazen. Princeton, N.J.: Prince­ ton University Press, 1992. Pp. x + 281; illustrations, notes, index. $29.95. There is space on my shelves, between Michael Faraday’s Chemical History of a Candle (London, 1933) and Walter Hough’s Fire as an Agent in Human Culture (Washington, D.C., 1926), for another book on fire in our culture. That by Robert and Margaret Hazen is limited to the role of fire in America from the beginnings of the United States until the majority of its cities had been electrified. It excludes the use of fire as a weapon, forest fires, and fire’s role in religious practices. The Hazens’ underlying thesis is the need for almost everyone to produce a flame and keep it going. Their tale is told in seven chapters on good servant, bad master, fighting back, keeping the homes fires burning, fire tending and maintenance, understand­ ing fire, and perpetuating the flame. A prologue sets out what the early settlers found when they came to America, and the epilogue reviews the modern period. Each has a battery of references. Each has a wealth of anecdote. There are interesting accounts of important fires and the reactions to them, the often desperate efforts technology and culture Book Reviews 195 to prevent and contain fires, and how the use of fire enabled people to live in hostile conditions. Unfortunately, those anecdotes take the place of analysis. The argument disappears in a tangle of tales. Important questions are not asked. Why has the death rate from fires in the United States been so much higher than in the United Kingdom for so long? When did Americans experience the change in expectations about the hazards of fire that occurred in London, around 1700, that Keith Thomas delineates in Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971)? The book is a chronicle, not a history. The part of the most technical chapter (6) that purports to expound the scientific basis of our understanding of fire raises two questions: for whom was it written and what does it achieve? I could not find a convincing answer to the first question. Occasionally, in the earlier chapters, the text needs to be expanded: on page 194 the authors refer to a previous mention of charcoal making in chapter 3, a more appropriate place for its explanation. If the reader has reached this far unaided, it is redundant. The answer to the second question is that the chapter lacks all coherence: historical notes, not always accurate or helpful, mix uneasily with a more formal exposition. The authors assert that Newton’s methods of attacking scientific problems were ineffective in attacking those of light and heat. But his general approach did, in the end, sweep away the notions of their...

Environmental Education Tools for Elementary Schoolchildren: The Use of a Popular Children's Magazine

Abstract A popular children's nature magazine, Ranger Rick, was evaluated for its ability to increase children's knowledge of animals and the natural world. A pretest/posttest design was used in a classroom comparison of 491 fifth graders from Wake County, North Carolina. Treatment subjects were given three issues of Ranger Rick magazine over a three-month period and all subjects were tested on the contents of the magazine features. Results show that these children increased their knowledge in portions of three different content areas including animals, plants, and ecological principles. Both treatment and control subjects ranked magazines as their primary source of information about wildlife and the environment. The results of this study indicate that the magazine can be used by classroom teachers as an effective environmental education tool.

NBS magazine features article on acoustic emission

NBS magazine features article on acoustic emission

A low-cholesterol menu in a steak restaurant

A twelve-month pilot project was conducted to test public reaction to a special restaurant menu identifying food choices low in cholesterol and saturated fat. The Houston steak house in which the "Help Your Heart" menu was tested prepared foods according to guidelines from dietitians of the Diet Modification Clinic, Baylor College of Medicine. Two newspaper articles, a brief magazine feature, and regularly scheduled radio advertising spots publicized the special menu. At the end of each month of the test period, the number of orders from the special menu was tallied for fourteen randomly selected days. Monthly sales from the special menu ranged from 2.5 to 5.1 per cent, with an overall average of 3.4 per cent. There was no statistically significant change from the mean of the percentage of total sales from the special menu over the months. Despite the relatively low percentage of total sales, restaurant executives were pleased with the results of the study and planned to offer the low-cholesterol menu indefinitely, eventually in an expanded form.

African Women, Fashion, and Scapegoating

A contemporary public controversy in East and Central Africa 1 focuses on the attire and behavior of African women, what they should and shouldn't wear, what they should and shouldn't do. A barrage of criticism lambastes the use of cosmetics and the wearing of particular fashions. Popular magazines feature articles entiled : How Do You Like Your Women: This Way or That ? They display pictures of a young woman in stretch pants next to one in traditional garb. Letters to the editor of newspapers accuse women of being blantantly provocative and of having completely lost their morals. Newspaper headlines read Africa's Sex Battle : and Why Must We Ape Western Ways ? Tribal associations pass resolutions stating that short dresses and wigs should be banned because they are not in the interests of African dignity and culture. This debate might be dismissed as a tempest in a teapot, a fad that like the mini-skirt itself will soon pass into oblivion except that along with the lighthearted banter, there are darker undertones. Many remarks are clearly intended to insult, ridicule and denigrate women. The debate has reached the national level of politics where members of parliament, cabinet ministers and even presidents have made pronouncements on particular fashions, and governments have issued directives Cover-Up and Lower Hemlines or Else on matters of dress. Mini-skirts were blamed for widespread rioting in Ethiopia in which 50 persons were injured, 100 vehicles destroyed, and schools closed for

Elections and the Mass Media

The purpose of this essay is to examine the role of the mass media in the electoral process: It will try to specify the character and dimensions of that role; try to outline, and sometimes to guess at, its consequences and potentialities. Because the activities of the media are so various, we can best begin this task, perhaps, just by noting and classifying the kinds of things the media do in elections. First, the media transmit campaign propaganda to large numbers of people. In news broadcasts and news columns they report directly or in paraphrase what campaigners say. They sell campaigners time and space for advertising their wares. They make it possible for the politician to reach more people, quicker and more cheaply, than he could in any other way. Second, the media transmit propaganda selectively. This is most apparent when media executives pare the propagandist's prodigious output to fit into the time and space they allot to reporting public affairs.1 They also exercise discretion when they sell time and space to political groups, however; they can refuse, and have refused, to accept advertising by minor parties and even major party groups. More than anything else, it is this ability of media personnel to determine media content that makes them political actors in their own right. Third, the media transmit propaganda in certain conventional formats. Newspapers present campaign messages in news columns, news features, advertisements, and occasionally in full transcript. Television and radio present them in fifteen and five minute newscasts; in standard time periods offered for sale; and in interviews, documentaries, panel shows, and debates. Magazines feature weekly summaries, interviews, picture stories. This matters because the formats that the mass media provide for political communication are not just different ways to present the same things. They lead politicians to say things differently and to say different things. Fourth, the media present campaign propaganda in the context of materials they themselves originate: their opinions about who ought to win; discussions of public policy issues; reports on campaign organization and methods; personality sketches of