Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.
Friends of Art History Visual Culture Series
October 14, 2016 at 2:30 PM
| Location: | 412 St. Patrick's Building |
| Cost: | Free |
Publicity photo from the brochure “Art Seminars in the Home,” c. 1958, Book-of-the-Month Club
Mitchell Frank, Associate Professor, Art History, SSAC, Carleton University
“‘Art for the Millions’”: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Book-of-the-Month Club”
In 1948, the Metropolitan Museum of Art began collaborating with the Book-of-the-Month Club on a series of commercially successful mail-order ventures. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures and the Metropolitan Seminars in Art brought in huge returns to both institutions and were distributed to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. These projects raise important questions about middlebrow culture and art education in postwar America, questions we are still grappling with today in our recent crisis in the humanities and in the age of Mass Open Online Courses. What is the value of an education in the arts and humanities as compared to vocational training? How is art education delivered to a mass audience? Should accessibility, sometimes thought of as “dumbing down,” be a goal of art education, when many think that interpretation involves a type of engagement that is not rule-governed or prescriptive? This talk will explore the details behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures and the Metropolitan Seminars in Art and examine some of the tensions that arose between the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a guardian of high culture, and the Book-of-the-Month Club, a commercial enterprise that cultivated middlebrow taste.