All posts tagged: American culture

Technoliberalism and the End of Participatory Culture in the United States

Reviewed by Christian Rossipal, NYU Tisch School of the Arts Adam Fish. Technoliberalism and the End of Participatory Culture in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan. 2017. 225 pages. Following the March release of the Trump administration’s “skinny budget,” and its proposed elimination of virtually all federal funding for public broadcasting—as well as for arts and humanities initiatives1 —Adam Fish’s Technoliberalism and the End of Participatory Culture in the United States comes as a timely volume, examining television as a democratic tool in the struggle for and of participatory public spheres in the media. Informed by the author’s own ethnographic research, the framework is a political-economical historiography, ranging from late 20th century corporate liberalism-regulated television to the unregulated Internet of contemporary neoliberalism. In this contested and overdetermined field, Fish situates the notion of technoliberalism as a designation of certain discourses on technology—most often coupled with deregulation—which seeks to invalidate the need for participatory politics. Fish outlines how these discourses are mobilized to “mitigate the contradictions of liberalism” itself.2 By connecting American television history to recent Internet conglomeration and …

Framing the Audience: Art and the Politics of Culture in the United States, 1929-1945

Reviewed by Elizabeth Eikmann, Saint Louis University Isadora Helfgott. Framing the Audience: Art and the Politics of Culture in the United States, 1929-1945. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. 326 pages. 21 color plates. The culture wars of the years surrounding the 1930s are known for the many and well-fought domestic battles over high art, popular culture, and consumerism. During this era, the barriers between high and popular art upheld by centuries of tradition came crumbling down as leftist American artists worked to redefine the relationship between art and the greater society. Mass circulation of visual media gave 1930s Americans unprecedented access to art and, as scholars such as Michael Denning have argued, it would be during this decade that art gained a new power to create, challenge, and reinforce ideas about national politics, economy, and identity. While numerous scholars have focused their work on the art produced during this time, Isadora Helfgott’s Framing the Audience: Art and the Politics of Culture in the United States, 1929-1945 flips the focus onto the figures behind and beyond the …