Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

5-2019

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Department

Fine Arts

Degree Program

Art (Creative) and Art History

Committee Chair

Fulton, Christopher

Committee Member

Heinecken, Dawn

Committee Member

Skaggs, Steven

Author's Keywords

advertising; marketing; graphic design; economics; credit; art

Abstract

This thesis is an examination of the visual rhetoric of the advertisements in 1920s America that encouraged consumers to implement payment plans to purchase commodities. It begins with an analysis of a standard advertisement found in a popular subscription journal and describes the ad’s reliance on an editorial-style layout to appeal to the rationality of the viewer, a theme common among marketing schemes of the surrounding decades. It uses an art historical approach to provide a new lens in studying capitalist economics and the provocative issue of empowerment versus confinement in the general visual representation of American housewives. The latter part of the thesis discusses the social and financial repercussions of these advertisements and asks of commercial art’s credibility as a subset of fine art to be considered seriously. The thesis is divided into three chapters, organized by three separate consumer industries that each promoted installment plans or borrowing on credit in their advertisements. Chapter One discusses the automotive industry as the opening ground for offering loans to the public. It gives an overview of different borrowing tactics promoted by Ford and General Motors, how they were marketed, and which one was successful while the other ultimately failed. Chapter Two looks into the expansion of kit homes sold by department stores and how the countrywide promotion of homeownership, as backed by prominent political figures, generated a demand for starting a new life with a mortgage in suburbia. Chapter Three expresses the pressures implemented on housewives of the era through common media and literature to be a successful hostess and homemaker, transferring the time and energy saved through kitchen appliances purchased on loan back into the home into extensive expectations of cleanliness, health, and home entertaining. The thesis concludes with bringing the three industries together, discussing how they all rely on each other to promote installment plans to their own benefit while simultaneously forming a new social landscape. The modern landscape of consumer credit in America is detailed, explaining how the successful visual rhetoric of marketing in the 1920s set the foundation for the country as one built upon debt. This visual rhetoric is then compared to that of fine historical art, and how the basic intentions for both high art and low art are more similar than is typically discussed or accepted.

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