"The Fair as a Spectacle": American Art and Culture at the 1893 World's Fair

The focus of this dissertation is the visual culture of the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893. Designed to showcase American achievements in all areas of human endeavor, the fair served as a glittering display and bustling marketplace for the products of American capitalism. At the same time, it was intended as a persuasive testimonial to the nation's cultural and aesthetic achievements. Despite their aura of conceptual disparateness, these two themes--which boil down to art and capital--were intimately entwined throughout the fair. In this dissertation I draw upon contemporary and historical theories of spectacle to analyze the intersection of aesthetic and commercial concerns at the fair. This conjunction produced a culture of display where illusionism and deception were at a premium, and where use value and exchange value were eclipsed by a more purely representational value. The centerpiece of the fair's display of national aesthetic achievement was the exhibition of American painting and sculpture in the Fine Arts Palace. Works by Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, George Inness, and John Singer Sargent appeared together with paintings and sculptures by artists who were well-established or rising stars at the time but whose names, by contrast, are unfamiliar today. This dissertation examines the form and content of all of these works, by well-known and less well-known artists alike, in relationship to the social and political forces operating throughout the fair itself, and by extension to related developments in American culture at large. The works of art are contextualized with the wide range of exhibits and performances staged around the fairgrounds, from anthropological tableaux to farm products, from historical artifacts to contemporary consumer goods, as well as with the fair's architecture and landscape design.