Visiting the Salon: Art, Exhibitions and the Experience of the Body at the Dawn of Mass Culture

Abstract

Throughout the 19th century, the official Salons held in Paris became massive events due to the number of exhibited works and visitors hardly imaginable today, constituting thus an early manifestation of mass culture. The format of these large temporary exhibitions, the specificity of the spaces in which there were held, the form of sociability and interaction to which they gave rise, influenced the experience of the spectators, different from that enjoyed in the museum or the private gallery. Based on examples taken from art criticism, literature and journalistic illustration, the article addresses the phenomenon of the Salon as an experience of the body, taking as a starting point the viewers and the multisensory experience fostered not only by the works on display but also by the conditions for their perception that existed during the visit to the exhibition. The audiences of the Salons were overexposed to stimuli that solicited sight, but also hearing, smell and touch. The experience of the Salons was mediated by social practices and exhibition modalities that produced different forms of encounter between the works of art and the body, and the bodies between themselves. The conditions in which contemporary artistic production was shown to the modern public refer to the constitution of the «sensory body» of the spectator in constant negotiation with all kinds of stimuli that are not only aesthetic, such as struggling with the crowd of visitors, shouting and noise, heat, humidity, and dust.