Buyways: Automobility, Billboards and the American Cultural Landscape
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...
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Gudis investigates the cultural implications of the billboards and other outdoor advertising on the built and natural environments, and people's experience of these basic facts of daily life. Pivoting on the themes of production, distribution, and consumption, she describes producing a landscape of signs, decentralization and the birth of the strip, and the business of highway beautification. The historical record, she notes, is heavily weighted toward big outdoor advertising companies and their most strident opponents, and it is difficult to know the range of what ordinary people thought of the ads or how their viewing affected their actions. Distributed by Taylor and Francis. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Introduction11Before the Car9Pt. 1Producing a Landscape of SignsA Nation on wheels372The Culture of Mobility403Producing Mobile Audiences and Corridors of Consumption494The Aesthetics of Speed and the Powers of "Picturization"665Modern Art and Advertising79Pt. 2Distributing Traffic and Trade: Decentralization and the Birth of the StripVisualizing Distribution1016The Consolidation and Growth of National Advertising1037Traffic and Trade: "Buying Power in Motion"1158An Architecture of Mobility1279The Strip151Pt. 3"The Billboard War": Scenic Sisters and the Business of Highway Beautification"The Billboard War"16310When Separate Spheres Collide16611The Pastoral View18212"Billboard Barons"19613Zoning and the Road to Federal Legislation211Losers and Winners227Conclusion: The Road Ahead231Acknowledgments247Notes251Bibliography303Illustration Credits319Index323
