Buyways: Automobility, Billboards and the American Cultural Landscape » (New Edition)

Catherine Gudis is an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma and received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. She has worked for several museums, including The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and is the editor of numerous art books, among them Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s and A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation.

Gudis investigates the cultural implications of the billboards and other outdoor advertising on the built and natural environments, and people's experience of these basic facts of daily life. Pivoting on the themes of production, distribution, and consumption, she describes producing a landscape of signs, decentralization and the birth of the strip, and the business of highway beautification. The historical record, she notes, is heavily weighted toward big outdoor advertising companies and their most strident opponents, and it is difficult to know the range of what ordinary people thought of the ads or how their viewing affected their actions. Distributed by Taylor and Francis. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR