Art and Its Audiences: Reception Issues in Early Mass Visual Culture
Thursday, February 4, 2010 - 5:00pm
Michael Leja, Professor of American Art, University of Pennsylvania
101 McCormick Hall at Princeton University

A new modern ecology of images took form in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Our ways of understanding and describing this new situation artistically and sociologically have relied on crude conceptual tools: notions of mass and elite cultures; highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow audiences; modernist fine art and commercial kitsch. Among other shortcomings, these categories are inadequate to the new, socially complex configurations of audience; to the profound hybridity of so-called fine and commercial works; and to the interpenetration of production and consumption in modern image markets. The metaphor of an image ecology of modernity (adapted from McLuhan's "media ecology," to which Ann Ardis has appended "of modernity") may serve as a more productive conceptual platform. My paper will test ways of modeling audience reception within this modern image ecology.

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