In this book, Kelly deftly brings together, in admirably lucid prose, a range of objects, institutions, artists, and contexts that are not often successfully combined. Her aim is to contribute a new understanding to the ways in which “the American republic of taste promised women and men a new and better way of being in the world,” even as it commodified and thus eroded the hierarchies that structured it (244). Kelly’s central thesis is posed in two questions: “Did an early national vocabulary of taste, with its privileged visuality, register beyond the debates over the ratification of the Constitution? Did it truly extend beyond political and politicized discourse to inform the imaginative structures and material forms of everyday life?” (5).
Showing a keen eye for novelistic detail, Kelly is at her best when using texts to illuminate how taste figured in the lives of everyday individuals, including largely forgotten artists...