Resumen de In Form We Trust: Neoplatonism, the Gold Standard, and the Machine Art Show, 1934
The Museum of Modern Art’s Machine Art show (1934) displayed ordinary things as works of art. It thus provides a useful case study for investigating interwar American modernism as a negotiation between meaning and materiality: terms up for renewed debate in the midst of the Great Depression. Through Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s catalog essay and Philip Johnson’s installation, Machine Art advanced a Neoplatonic model of materiality—one consistent with Johnson’s undergraduate training at Harvard, modernism’s pursuit of purity, and the rash of gold hoarding that spread in the United States after the American gold standard was abandoned in 1933.
