As seen on TV : the visual culture of everyday life in the 1950s

Author(s)

Bibliographic Information

As seen on TV : the visual culture of everyday life in the 1950s

Karal Ann Marling

Harvard University Press, 1994

  • : pbk

Other Title

As seen on television

Available at  / 34 libraries

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Note

Bibliographical references: p. [289]-318

Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Volume

ISBN 9780674048829

Description

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.
Volume

: pbk ISBN 9780674048836

Description

America in the 1950s: the world was not so much a stage as a setpiece for TV, the new national phenomenon. It was a time when how things looked--and how we looked--mattered, a decade of design that comes to vibrant life in As Seen on TV. From the painting-by-numbers fad to the public fascination with the First Lady's apparel to the television 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, this book shows us as never before those artful everyday objects that stood for American life in the 1950s, as seen on TV.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1.Namie Eisenhower's New Look 2.Hyphenated Culture: Painting by Numbers in the New Age of Leisure 3.Disneyland, 1955: The Place That Was Also a TV Show 4.Autoeroticism: America's Love Affair with the Car in the Television Age 5.When Elvis Cut His Hair: The Meaning of Mobility 6.Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book: The Aesthetics of food in the 1950s 7.Nixon in Moscow: Appliances, Affluence, and Americanism Afterword Notes Illustration Credits Acknowledgments Index

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