Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamour of Media in Motion

It's easy to take for granted today that we can just "jet off" to destinations near and far, or see the latest news from the four corners of the Earth brought to our screens in all of their rich color. But as Vanessa Schwartz demonstrates in this engaging and beautifully-illustrated book, our world of rapid motion and vision has a fascinating history — the history of a time and place that named itself and had its own vivid style: the Jet Age.The Jet Age was of course the age of jets, but it was also the age of Disneyland, new airport designs (JFK, LAX, Dulles, Paris-Orly), globe-trotting press photographers, and artists fascinated by movement and color. Part of what makes this book so enjoyable and significant is how it weaves these stories together while also making us think about them in new ways. Take Walt Disney, the entertainer, pioneer of animated films, and of course the creator of Disneyland. He was all of those things, but it turns out he also had the mind of an engineer and urban designer — he was a pioneer of putting people and objects in smooth motion. One of his counterparts in this endeavor, Schwartz shows us, was Eero Saarinen, the great Finnish architect we know for his elegant midcentury designs but who also, it turns out, was equally fascinated by the nitty-gritty of people-moving technologies. Ever ride the mobile lounges at Dulles? Their story is here.This book also has the stories of the people—the "jet setters," press photographers, and artists—who zoomed from Dulles to JFK to LAX to Paris and far beyond. Driven by fast motion, they created a lifestyle and an image of the world that fascinated newspaper and magazine readers at the time and that still, in many ways, defines the world we have today. Perhaps the most intriguing story the book tells is about the origins of our networked world: how we learned to be connected to the rest of the world.In sum, you will love this book for the unique stories it tells, and you'll also really learn something new about how histories of technology and art can and should be told together. If we have come to take it for granted that we can travel around the world, whether physically on planes or from the comfort of our sofas, it isn't just because new technologies made it possible. It is also because art and design made us want to do it by showing us that movement is exciting, beautiful, glamorous, and, as Walt Disney new best, just plain fun!

This book, by a scholar of visual culture at the University of Southern California, considers our present globally connected moment and asks how we got here. Our Internet age, marked by fast but fluid motion, was prefigured by the rise of the jet airplane several decades earlier. That new glamorous experience of travel seeped into modern life in surprising ways, from airport architecture to Disney, to photojournalism to news magazines. The book is creative, unexpected, and full of beautiful photos. You won't find another like it.

This book is like an art object in itself, telling a new story about the 20th century not just through words but also through incredible images. It is a vision of change that is more relevant than ever, as issues of global motion and interconnectedness are now central to our daily lives - and to how our future will look. It makes this book essential reading to better understand how we got here and where we can go in the years ahead.

The author shows how design and engineering lead to Jet Age. Much of the book is not focused on objects but on places like airports and Disneyland. At times I did feel that the author was stretching his thesis and writing was dry in places. The illustrations included really add to the book. I always enjoy looking at the vintage advertising and the artist drawings. Enjoy