Visualizing Consumer Culture, Commodifying Visual Culture : Spectacles of the Consumer Society

Abstract

In London, from May to October 1851, countless shoppers and strollers walked the aisles of the Crystal Palace, specially designed and built to house the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, to admire the displays of commodities which had been mostly produced in Great Britain and its colonies—representing more than half of the exhibited consumer goods. The Crystal Palace was an architectural feat, an awe-inspiring structure of glass and iron ; as for the Great Exhibition, ...