The Arts of Democracy
Art, Public Culture, and the State

Casey Nelson Blake, Editor

384 pages | 6 x 9 | 45 illus.
Cloth 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4029-0 | $49.95s | £32.50 | Add to shopping cart
Paper 2009 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2001-8 | $24.95s | £16.50 | Add to shopping cart
A volume in the Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America series
View table of contents

"A comprehensive and profound investigation into the place and role of the public arts in culture."—Journal of American Culture

"The Arts of Democracy is an ambitious, well-conceived collection of essays that works through 'the relationship between the arts and public life in modern America.' . . . The essays move with precision between artists and agencies and the Cold War policies that shaped both in national and international contexts. Roughly, the narrative arc of the essays contends that the embrace by Cold War-inspired agencies of abstraction and modernism (and jazz) as evidence of American freedom from Soviet-style tyranny produced a singular moment for U.S. public culture that eventually gave way to hostility from the Left and from the Right that has resulted in a desire for a return to 'tradition' in various forms."—The Journal of American History

"The Arts of Democracy is a wonderful collection that addresses a set of vitally important topics. The essays range widely and imaginatively, offering nuanced considerations of the relationship between art, public culture, and the state. The book will be a must-read not only among historians and art historians, but also among arts administrators, foundation officers, and public officials."—Daniel Horowitz, author of Betty Friedan and the Making of "The Feminine Mystique"

Influenced by two decades of debate inside and outside the academy about the relationship among the arts, politics, and public policy, the essays collected in The Arts of Democracy represent the coming of age of one of the liveliest fields in contemporary academic life. Written by some of the most respected and accomplished scholars working in their fields, this volume illuminates the often contradictory impulses that have shaped the historical intersection of the arts, public culture, and the state in modern America, beginning with an art market at the turn of the twentieth century that supported a notion of civic identity, through the mid-century era of state-sponsored art, to the postmodern disconnect between artistic and civic languages.

Topics range from Norman Rockwell as public artist and the creation of the NEA visual arts program to State Department-sponsored jazz tours in the mid-twentieth century and religious displays in the twenty-first century. Taken together, the essays in The Arts of Democracy pave the way for future study in the complex and interwoven histories of artistic expression, values, ideology, statecraft, and democratic aspiration.

Distributed for the Woodrow Wilson Center Press.

Casey N. Blake is Professor of History and American Studies at Columbia University.

| View your shopping cart | Browse Penn Press titles in American History, American Studies