Ways of Seeing Advertising: Law and the Making of Visual Commercial Culture

This article examines the role of law in shaping visual commercial culture by telling story hoarding—the outdoor advertising surface for posters—in formative decades mass Britain, from roughly 1840 to 1914. The hoarding emerged this period as a distinct property and focal point contestation over ways seeing. Its meaning environment hinged on questions, which are still resonant today, about interaction between economic aesthetic categories: art, capital beauty, commerce culture. Historical actors—among them organized billposting trade, National Society Checking Abuses Public Advertising, civil society organization that took up cause protecting public spaces advertising, governmental local lawmakers, citizens—enlisted private legal means respond these questions. analysis draws an expansive interdisciplinary archive trace them. As it shows, were engaged cultural demarcation or what Thomas Gieryn has aptly termed boundary work. In establishing boundaries, defined terms became integral element daily experience, at once omnipresent derided. history thus offers deep insights studies.