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  • A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste:Funding Art in the Great Depression
  • Jennifer Jane Marshall (bio)
Victoria Grieve . The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. x + 240 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00.

In The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture, Victoria Grieve presents an important chapter in the history of a grand idea: the self-consciously noble effort to democratize "culture" in the United States. Examining the many different programs of the New Deal's Federal Art Project (1935-43), Grieve's larger aim is to chart the motivations that lay behind them. She argues that the Great Depression offered latter-day Progressives a unique, laboratory-like opportunity to try out, on a broad scale, the sociological and educational theories that had once been the narrow purview of school teachers and reformers. Grieve gestures forward, too, showing how Progressive-era do-goodism begat not only New Deal liberalism, but also the middlebrow cultural aspirations of the postwar period. Ultimately, Grieve seeks to demonstrate that, when the federal government got in the business of bringing art to the people, it also legitimized a set of cultural ideals and aesthetic values that would later be described as "middlebrow." These included: an emphasis on national tradition and patrimony; faith in the beneficence of democratic community; reliance on experts for cultural guidance; and the belief in the marketplace as the public's most viable meeting ground.

The book combines intellectual history with cultural history in order to assess material that might also be claimed by art history. The intermingling of specialized fields of knowledge recalls the ethos of the New Deal itself. Fertile cross-pollinations were the aim of FDR's "think tanks," and they occur here, too—to similar effect: bringing innovative forcefulness, but also the risk of putting off disciplinary specialists. To the latter point, a discussion of John Dewey's Hegelianism might irritate intellectual historians who see this as a vestigial tail of the philosopher's undergraduate education (and so not really operative during the period Grieve considers); and art historians might ask for clarification on how, exactly, the "clean, crisp, modernist style" of New Deal posters might have "paved the way for the emergence of abstract expressionism," [End Page 533] (p. 98). Such are the perils of working between academic fiefdoms, even when a subject like the Federal Art Project (FAP) demands it.

What's more important is that Grieve's studious responsibility to the wider field of interwar American historiography affords two important contributions. First, it is an immensely timely book: one that delivers a comprehensive history of Depression-era cultural politics in an engaging and accessible tone, enough so that the book might feasibly inform some of today's social-economic architects. Second, in uncovering the connective tissue between, for example, Dewey's anti-dualistic belief in the unity of art and everyday experience, Holger Cahill's management of the FAP as a tool for improving all aspects of American life, and an advertiser's hope that the application of art to manufacturing might cure some of the more "evil aspects of the industrial revolution" (p. 60), Grieve offers multiple points of access into one of the thorniest problems of interwar cultural boosterism in the United States. Namely, she investigates the liberal, Depression-era effort to remake American society through the channels of consumerism and good taste.

Examining taste-making—and taking it seriously for the political idealism it often espoused—locates Grieve within an important generational shift in social history. A number of younger historians are reinvestigating America's storied transition from producerism to consumerism with a slightly different eye than the one that jaundiced the Marxian social historians of generations before. Where the examples of Thorstein Veblen and Pierre Bordieu had once compelled historians to read between the lines of seemingly innocent cultural tastes—an approach that yielded studies like Carol Duncan and Allan Wallach's landmark exposé on "The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual"1—a new crop of historians lends a more sympathetic ear to the pieties of last century's taste-makers. Grieve...

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