Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape

ISBN-13: 9780415934541 / Angielski / Twarda / 2004 / 336 str.

Catherine Gudis

Opis

In Buyways, Catherine Gudis focuses on the development of the outdoor advertising industry in twentieth century America, and its role in the commodification of the landscape. She investigates how the industry was instrumental in the growth of mobile consumption, arguing that outdoor advertisers provided the structure for what she terms 'the architecture of speed.' Throughout, she interweaves analyses of gender and consumption, the corporatization of American culture, the increasing rationalization of marketing/advertising, and the growth of suburbs and strips. Ultimately, she aims to explain how a certain method of visual consumption, combined with a particular type of mobility, came to govern much of Americans' lives as consumers.

Recenzje

"Gudis' prose is... aerodynamic... a cultural history of roadside advertising, its meanings and methods, and how it reshaped the American scene." -- Los Angeles Times
"Editorial Abstract
." -- Reference and Research Books News
"Gudis' prose is... aerodynamic... a cultural history of roadside advertising, its meanings and methods, and how it reshaped the American scene.
." -- L.A. Times
"...inclusive, thorough research and scholarship that makes this volume an indispensable resource for both enthusiasts and scholars of the American road." -- Carol Ahlgren, The Journal of American History

Spis treści

Introduction 1. Before the Car Part I: Producing a Landscape of Signs 2. A Nation on Wheels 3. The Culture of Mobility 4. Producing Mobile Audiences and Corridors of Consumption 5. The Aesthetics of Speed and the Powers of Picturization 6. Modern Art and Advertising Part II: Distributing Traffic and Trade: Decentralization and the Birth of the Strip 7. Visualizing Distribution 8. The Consolidation and Growth of National Advertising 9. Traffic and Trade: Buying Power in Motion 10. An Architecture of Mobility 11. The Strip Part III: The Billboard War: Scenic Sisters and the Business of Highway Beautification 12. The Billboard War 13. When Separate Spheres Collide 14. The Pastoral View 15. Billboard Barons 16. Zoning and the Road to Federal Legislation 17. Losers and Winners Conclusion : The Road Ahead Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Illustration Credits Index

O autorze

Catherine Gudis is an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma and received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. She has worked for several museums, including The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and is the editor of numerous art books, among them Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s and A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation.