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The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture. By Victoria Grieve. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. x, 229 pp. $45.00, isbn 978-0-252-03421-3.)
Victoria Grieve situates the history of the New Deal's Federal Art Project (fap) in a broader effort by American intellectuals, curators, and arts administrators to challenge the idea of art as a privileged realm inaccessible to ordinary citizens. In contrast to scholars who identify the fap, which ran from 1935 to 1943, with the 1930s Left, Grieve sees the agency as the culmination of a movement for "middlebrow" cultural reform that began during the Progressive Era. Like the founders of the Book of the Month Club, "fap administrators attempted to create a domestic market for art by redefining it as a commodity within economic and intellectual reach of all Americans" (p. 6). Grieve...