Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape

by Catherine Gudis

Overview

The highway has become the buyway. Along the millions of miles the public travels, advertisers spend billions on images of cola, cars, vodka, fast food, and swimming pools that blur past us, catching our fleeting attention and turning the landscape into a corridor of commerce. A smart, succinct, and visually compelling history of the billboard in America, Buyways traces how the outdoor advertising industry changed the face of American commercialism. Taking us from itinerant bill-stickers of circus posters in the 19th century to the blinking, beeping, 3-D eyesores of today, Gudis argues that roadside advertising has turned the landscape itself into a commodity to be bought and sold as advertising space. Buyways vividly chronicles the battles between environmentalists and businessmen as well as the response of artists, from New Deal photographers who satirized the billboard-infested landscape to commercial artists who embraced the kitsch of it all. It also shows how advertisers tapped into the American mythology of the open road, promoting mobile consumption as the American Dream on four wheels. Entertaining and brilliantly illustrated, Buyways is a vibrant road map of the new geography of consumption. Also includes an eight page color insert.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781135952433
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/15/2004
Series:	Cultural Spaces
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Catherine Gudis is an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma and received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. She has worked for several museums, including The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and is the editor of numerous art books, among them Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s and A Forestof Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1. Before the Car Part I: Producing a Landscape of Signs 2. A Nation on Wheels 3. The Culture of Mobility 4. Producing Mobile Audiences and Corridors of Consumption 5. The Aesthetics of Speed and the Powers of Picturization 6. Modern Art and Advertising Part II: Distributing Traffic and Trade: Decentralization and the Birth of the Strip 7. Visualizing Distribution 8. The Consolidation and Growth of National Advertising 9. Traffic and Trade: Buying Power in Motion 10. An Architecture of Mobility 11. The Strip Part III: The Billboard War: Scenic Sisters and the Business of Highway Beautification 12. The Billboard War 13. When Separate Spheres Collide 14. The Pastoral View 15. Billboard Barons 16. Zoning and the Road to Federal Legislation 17. Losers and Winners Conclusion : The Road Ahead Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Illustration Credits Index

Editorial Reviews

"Gudis' prose is... aerodynamic... a cultural history of roadside advertising, its meanings and methods, and how it reshaped the American scene." — Los Angeles Times
"Editorial Abstract
." — Reference and Research Books News
"Gudis' prose is... aerodynamic... a cultural history of roadside advertising, its meanings and methods, and how it reshaped the American scene.
." — L.A. Times
"...inclusive, thorough research and scholarship that makes this volume an indispensable resource for both enthusiasts and scholars of the American road." — Carol Ahlgren, The Journal of American History

From the Publisher