The cake in the kitchen, the house in the suburbs, Mamie in her mink stole, Elvis in his pink Cadillac. It was America in the 1950s, and the world was not so much a stage as a setpiece for TV, the new national phenomenon. It was a decade of design, a time when how things looked - and how "we" looked - mattered. This text portrays a visual culture reflecting and reflected in the powerful new medium of television. Looking closely at a number of celebrated instances in which the principles of design dominated the public arena and captivated the popular imagination, Karal Ann Marling gives us an in-depth picture of the taste and sensibility of the postwar era. From Walt Disney's Wednesday night TV show, the leap was easy to his theme park, where the wildly popular TV characters could be seen firsthand, and Marling conducts us through this heady concoction of real life and fantasy. Next the text examines the picture-perfect world of "Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book" of 1950, the runaway bestseller of the decade, and shows us how the look of food, culminating in the TV Dinner, attained paramount importance.
From the painting-by-numbers fad to the sensation of Elvis Presley to the sculptural refinement of the automobile, Marling explores what Americans saw and what they looked for with a gaze newly trained by TV. A study in style, in material culture, in art history at eye level, her book shows us as never before those artful everyday objects that stood for American life in the 1950s, as seen on TV, attained paramount importance.
- ISBN10 0674048822
- ISBN13 9780674048829
- Publish Date 5 August 1998 (first published 31 March 1996)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 17 June 2010
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Harvard University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 336
- Language English