The “Chamberlain Casket” that Seattle Times stupidly called “painfully kitschy.” COURTESY OF SEATTLE ART MUSEUM
To understand exactly what makes the artists of 19th-century Britain, the age of Queen Victoria, radical, one must not first point at the art of that period but its economy.
What few people understand is that industrial production was completely new to the world. That’s important for two reasons. One, it transformed the structure of time. Under the agrarian order, time was attached to the seasons. Under the industrial order, it was tied to the working (or factory) hours, which remained the same in spring, summer, fall, and winter.
The other impact was the mass production of luxuries. In the past, sugar, for example, was only for the rich; in the industrial period, this changed. It became available to all classes.
