The Art Press and Its Parodies: Unraveling Networks in Swinburne’s 1868 Academy Notes

One irony of networks is that their establishment is often fragile and subject to conflict because they are both inclusive and exclusive, and thus permeable. The concept of network that I use in this paper, borrowed from anthropology and narratology, is a social-intertextual one that involves not only networks of people and institutions, but also of texts that create networks among them or can interpellate networks of their readerspectators. In the case of the art world, the network combines both roles.¹ An amorphous network of Victorian art spectators was interpellated by critical reviews in magazines and newspapers and in special art press periodical annuals published during the exhibition season. These reviews collectively but unevenly shaped class and gender cultural identities and even a national identity through art’s multiple discourses. The Academy Notes publications on the annual spring exhibition of the Royal Academy (RA), invented by John Ruskin to educate Victorian middle-class taste, became a regular annual feature later written, or rather compiled, by Henry Blackburn from the 1870s to the early ‘90s and illustrated by the artists themselves. The annual Notes was a lifesaver for spectators struggling to absorb over 2,000 works at the annual Royal Academy exhibition. Critics and spectators were joined in acts of virtual seeing through the Notes catalog that tied the current exhibition to a still-emerging discourse. Academy Notes permitted the spectating public to share a catalogue and a discourse that guided aesthetic judgment within regulated cultural norms of value for money, work ethic, realist depiction of everyday life, domestic ideals, gender conventions, and domestic and imperial subject matter.

Thus, looking at art was scripted and conditioned and as much a social system as it was a cultural one, as art writings constructed viewing experiences and “relevant” knowledge. In the process, art writings co-produced works of art, as Pierre Bourdieu has argued, so that meanings, social functions, and even the magic of art were consequences of art language.² Art viewing was also democratizing and unifying; the Penny Magazine taught workers about art, and Punch’s parodies of art institutions presumed its mass readership understood the art world.

I want to consider how the art world network, so scripted and conditioned, lent itself to a special kind of parody in the 1868 Academy Notes co-written by William Michael Rossetti and Charles Algernon Swinburne, each writing half the text. William Michael assured readers in the preface that each critic spoke his own mind about his own tastes. His contribution sustained the genre’s Ruskinian didactic functions, which had emerged over recent decades of exhibitions, press criticism, and Academy Notes: buoying up networks of spectators and artists through intertwined descriptions and prescriptions that directed spectators to, presumably, the most important works that exemplified aesthetic values. Swinburne, in his contribution, wrote about some exhibited paintings, including works discussed by William Michael. But in a dramatic turn, Swinburne then devoted the second half of his essay to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s works that were not exhibited at the RA and not available to the public at all. Anticipating this curious strategy, F. G. Stephens in 1865 anonymously reviewed Rossetti’s unseen work in the Athenaeum, for which Stephens was the art critic. Arguing that exhibition was “merely an incident in the existence of a picture,” Stephens hoped the public would see these works “to judge for itself” Rossetti’s merits.³

Perversely, Swinburne did not want to educate his readers, but rather to parody the educational function of Academy Notes, a genre that was, after all, informative only in the most cursory way that merely reinforced existing taste. Often RA exhibition reviews in general would identify the network with such phrases as, “unlike last year’s exhibition,” or “this year the artist has changed,” implying a continual discourse. Swinburne rejected the democratizing and regulating functions of Academy Notes, along with the genre’s assumption of an imagined community of spectators, critics, and artists brought together through catalogue and exhibition. Swinburne undermined this network’s claim to dominance and hegemony by suggesting...