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More on Pursuits & Retreats from The Atlantic Monthly. Contents | September 2006 From the archives:
"No Room at the Inn"
(November 2001)
Also by Virginia Postrel:
"The Iconographer"
(November 2006)
"Superhero Worship"
(October 2006)
"The Next Starbucks?"
(July/August 2006)
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Pursuits & Retreats
Commerce and Culture
Signs of Our Times(page 1 of 2)In under a century, neon signs—part sculpture, part lighting, part billboard—have gone from marketing tool to tacky trash to folk art ..... Neon’s glowing colors and sinuous shapes haven’t changed significantly since the 1920s, but the medium’s meanings, and its fortunes, have shifted dramatically over the decades. The history of neon signs suggests how thoroughly entangled memory, identity, and hope are with even the purest sensory pleasures—and how truly subjective are the clashing tastes that shape aesthetic regulations.
Virginia Postrel is a contributing editor of The Atlantic and the author of The Substance of Style and The Future and Its Enemies. Her blog, the Dynamist, can be found at www.dynamist.com/weblog. Copyright © 2006 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; September 2006; Signs of Our Times; Volume 298, No. 2; 137-141 |
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ike the skyscraper, the automobile, and the motion-picture palace, neon signs once symbolized popular hopes for a new era of technological achievement and commercial abundance. From the 1920s to the 1950s, neon-lit streets pulsed with visual excitement from Vancouver to Miami. Large-scale spectaculars—tropical fish up to forty-three feet long hypnotically swimming past the Wrigley Spearman, or acrobatic Little Lulu lighting up each letter of a giant Kleenex box as she tumbled across it—provided free entertainment, while the humblest shop signs turned the urban night into well-lighted public space.