Book Review: Empire’s nature: Mark Catesby’s New World vision

Abstract

a sense that class positions are the generators of cultural positions and cultural institutions rather than being formed through them. There is no room here for Pierre Bourdieu, and little sense of publics structured or fractured along other social dimensions, such as gender and race. To pursue his themes Taylor’s method involves an unravelling of the connections between the making of gallery spaces, the art on display, the intentions of art professionals, philanthropists and politicians, and broader questions of economic, political and social power. What he has provided, therefore, is a history which redescribes these important social spaces and expertly differentiates them in terms of form and purpose. It is a shame, therefore, that despite the book’s title the analysis effectively ends in 1972. This means foregoing the opportunity to examine in the same detail important changes in the 1980s and 1990s – the sponsorship of huge and prestigious exhibitions and extensions by private companies, competition between public and private collections, and, perhaps most importantly, the rise to prominence of the gallery shop and its constitution of new publics through the direct consumption of artworks in the age of their serial mechanical reproduction onto T-shirts, mugs, notebooks, postcards, calendars, cushions and more. At the end, however, despite careful scrutiny of what visual, statistical and textual evidence there is, the gallery-goer and his or her motivations remain as mysterious as ever. While ‘the public’ is brought into existence in a variety of ways for a range of purposes and composed and fragmented as arts bureaucracies, curators and patrons imagine and reimagine their social and cultural roles, members of the public are only fleetingly glimpsed and imperfectly understood. This gulf between rhetorical publics and people who look at pictures is beautifully revealed in a Mass Observation report from the Tate Gallery in December 1938 (p. 172): ‘Two women (about 30 years) entered 11.14. A: bareheaded, black overcoat, coloured silk scarf. B: black hat with veil, astrakhan coat, both upper class . . . At 11.18 /2 A goes into room 23, B looks at 3468, 3842, and 4923, then follows A . . . Both look at 4239 (20 seconds) and Portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell (on loan) 15 seconds, The Rock of Gibraltar by Charles Conder 15 seconds. Enter room 21, 11.26, but before leaving look back at 4239 and A says “. . . whopping great flower . . .”