Republic of Taste

When scholars consider the founding of the American Republic they usually imagine a political story. In The Republic of Taste Catherine E. Kelly offers instead an aesthetic tale. To be sure, politics and taste go hand in hand. As Kelly argues, “American thinkers explored questions about taste and beauty in order to wrestle with questions about power and authority” (p. 4). Across chapter-length case studies, Kelly demonstrates that the exercise of taste was a tool for citizenship, enabling individuals to hone personal and collective virtue, and to construct an American identity out of European examples and colonial precedents. Kelly extends the republic of taste beyond Anglo-American elites to “ordinary women and men” from an “emerging middle class” newly able to purchase more affordable luxury goods (pp. 5–6). Kelly also widens her gaze to encompass a series of ubiquitous but understudied artworks and artifacts in early America: students' writing specimens, inexpensive portraits, portrait miniatures, and waxworks. Her evidence derives overwhelmingly from New England, with nods to Philadelphia, raising the question: Did an aesthetic republic vary in southern climes where planters welcomed British mores and French and Spanish colonists provided cultural alternatives

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Beauty · Citizenship · Middle class · Mores · Political science · Politics · Portrait · Power (physics · Sociology · Taste · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · History · Latin American history and culture · Law · Psychology