by Jon Lackman | 16 July 2010 | Books
Also in caa.reviews recently, Laura R. Prieto reviewed Dianne Sachko Macleod’s Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940:
It is an open secret that many museums, large and small, owe the strength of their collections to women patrons, yet few scholars to date have studied women as serious art collectors and tastemakers … Macleod traces the arc of women’s involvement in collecting. What originated as a solitary pursuit in the early nineteenth century blossomed into a Gilded Age social performance. It then transformed gender expectations at the turn of the twentieth century … In Macleod’s conception, collecting art was a sort of consumption that led to psychological and emotional empowerment … Whereas market-driven mass consumption might co-opt women’s desires, the purchase and control of art objects ultimately gave women access to “the male discourse of possessive individualism” (45). Some then projected their emancipation outward to the built environment, the staging of world’s fairs, suffrage advocacy, and philanthropy … [Macleod's] interdisciplinary approach ultimately relies most on psychoanalytic theory, especially the concept of transitional objects and the well-established psychological significance of play. Macleod argues persuasively that collecting could be imaginative, creative play, from a manifestation of desire to an act of reverie … An underdeveloped aspect of the study is the role of class and race in collecting … Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects will captivate scholars in many fields, from material culture and American studies to women’s and gender studies. This is not only a book whose physical beauty will grace the shelves; Macleod raises fascinating questions about the connection between art and subjectivity.
