Design
The Art of the Crowd
A new exhibition explores how the masses of 20th-century America pushed artists in new directions.
Being among crowds is a daily part of urban life—so much so that it’s easy to forget it’s a relatively new experience. As the German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote in 1912:
What a strange new mode for society. After the Industrial Revolution, crowds were (and are) everywhere, in all kinds of conditions: On streets, in stadiums, stacked in skyscrapers, spread out on beaches; they are indifferent, joyous, mournful, riotous. In the late 19th and early 20th century, academics grappled with the crowd’s effect on the human mind, while politicians harnessed crowd anxiety to build arguments against immigration and suffrage. And artists developed new approaches of representing the masses—possibly anticipating, or even giving rise to, abstract art.