The arts and the imagined audience : Theatre, radio, and the emotion of vulnerability

Across a range of museums, arts and media of the 1930s were employed as a tool for interspersing personal and individual experience within one of the largest bureaucratic government interventions of the modern era. The arts here explicitly evoke the emotional side of vulnerability, which is viewed alongside government policy and assists museum visitors in forming an imagined view of their Depression-era counterparts. This chapter recognises that some of the most successful exhibitions on this era have employed artistic material as historical objects. Simultaneously it argues that because of the limitations of interpreting the performing arts in museums, at times, the most revelatory products are also the least suited to the exhibition genre, raising questions about the absent narrative or artefact.

© Meighen Katz, 2020. All rights reserved