How art becomes history : essays on art, society, and culture in post-New Deal America

Summary: These essays on American art and culture explore overlapping social, political, cultural and aesthetic issues of post-New Deal America. The book discusses some of the pioneering developments in art history and cultural studies, from the dissolution of formalism in the late 1960s to the reemergence of Marxism in the 1970s and the infusion of semiotic, feminist, psychoanalytical and racial issues in the 1980s. Also covered is the expanding range of interest of art history into examinations of the social, aesthetic and political implications of popular culture. The subjects include the FSA photography project; the racial and cultural politics of the museum; the 1964 World's Fair; artists' representations of the Vietnam War; sexual liberation and avant-garde film of the 1960s; and the political function of artists' writings in the 1980s. Maurice Berger explains the very special nature of American culture from the 1930s to the present, centering on the way in which the 1960s witnessed both a culmination of the New Deal vision and a rejection of these older values in the form of a radical counterculture.