The Art-Union and Photography, 1839-1854: the First Fifteen Years Of
THE ART-UNION AND PHOTOGRAPHY, 1839-1854: THE FIRST FIFTEEN YEARS OF CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT BETWEEN TWO CULTURAL ICONS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Derek Nicholas Boetcher, B.A., M.A. Thesis Prepared for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS August 2011 APPROVED: Denis Paz, Major Professor Denise Amy Baxter, Minor Professor Olga Velikanova, Committee Member Richard B. McCaslin, Chair of the Department of History James D. Meernik, Acting Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Boetcher, Derek Nicholas. The Art-Union and Photography, 1839-1854: The First Fifteen Years of Critical Engagement between Two Cultural Icons of Nineteenth-Century Britain. Master of Arts (History), August 2011, 163 pp., bibliography, 69 titles. This study analyzes how the Art-Union, a British journal interested only in the fine arts, approached photography between 1839 and 1854. It is informed by Karl Marx’s materialism- informed commodity fetishism, Gerry Beegan’s conception of knowingness, Benedict Anderson’s imagined community, and an art critical discourse that was defined by Roger de Piles and Joshua Reynolds. The individual chapters are each sites in which to examine these multiple theoretical approaches to the journal’s and photography’s association in separate, yet sometimes overlapping, periods. One particular focus of this study concerns the method through which the journal viewed photography—as an artistic or scientific enterprise. A second important focus of this study is the commodification of both the journal and photography in Britain. Also, it determines how the journal’s critical engagement with photography fits into the structure and development of a nineteenth-century British social collectivity focused on art and the photographic enterprise.
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