In 1967, the art magazine Art in America published five designs for public service billboards ostensibly conceived to encourage people to visit their local museum. Each billboard design reproduced a newly commissioned work of art by a contemporary American artist above the generic call to action ‘See it Happening at your Museum.’ Although the winning billboard was ‘offered to museums across the country to publicize their activities,’ there is no evidence that it was ever actually used, even though the whole initiative was sponsored by the industry lobby group, the Institute of Outdoor Advertising. In this paper, I will consider how these billboard concepts absorbed the language of the public service campaign as part of a broader rebuttal of government regulation of the outdoor advertising industry resulting from the Highway Beautification Act of 1965.
Building on the scholarship of historian Lewis L. Gould on the efforts of the billboard lobby to resist the legislation famously advocated by Lady Bird Johnson, my paper will show how art and aesthetics were central to the terms of their opposition. Gould briefly notes that one firm installed billboards reproducing the Mona Lisa and Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy, but the previously unremarked initiative that is my case study importantly confirms the participation of the American avant-garde in such activities. I will consider the formulation of this campaign and the art historical relevance of the works of art it incorporated. My account will show how the campaign deployed modern (and in this case mainly abstract) art to resist government regulation by demonstrating the subjectivity of aesthetic judgment and using the products of human creativity to disrupt legislation’s appeal to nature conservation.