Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Spectacular Modernity: Dictatorship, Space, and Visuality in Venezuela, 1948-1958

Spectacular Modernity: Dictatorship, Space, and Visuality in Venezuela, 1948-1958

Blackmore, Lisa

Paperback

Series: Illuminations, Book 76

Art Criticism & TheoryGeneral ArchitectureSouth American History

ISBN10: 0822964384
ISBN13: 9780822964384
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: May 10 2017
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
In cultural history, the 1950s in Venezuela are commonly celebrated as a golden age of modernity, realized by a booming oil economy, dazzling modernist architecture, and nationwide modernization projects. But this is only half the story. In this path-breaking study, Lisa Blackmore reframes the concept of modernity as a complex cultural formation in which modern aesthetics became deeply entangled with authoritarian politics. Drawing on extensive archival research and presenting a wealth of previously unpublished visual materials, Blackmore revisits the decade-long dictatorship to unearth the spectacles of progress that offset repression and censorship. Analyses of a wide range of case studies--from housing projects to agricultural colonies, urban monuments to official exhibitions, and carnival processions to consumer culture--reveal the manifold apparatuses that mythologized visionary leadership, advocated technocratic development, and presented military rule as the only route to progress. Offering a sharp corrective to depoliticized accounts of the period, Spectacular Modernity instead exposes how Venezuelans were promised a radically transformed landscape in exchange for their democratic freedoms.

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