Art Wars: The Politics of Taste in Nineteenth-Century New York

A study of three controversies that illuminate the changing cultural role of art exhibition in the nineteenth century

From the antebellum era through the Gilded Age, New York City's leading art institutions were lightning rods for conflict. In the decades before the Civil War, art promoters believed that aesthetic taste could foster national unity and assuage urban conflicts; by the 1880s such hopes had faded, and the taste for art assumed more personal connotations associated with consumpti...