Optimism Lost? Or Merely Moved? A Brief History Of World’s Fairs

From the earliest expositions in London and Paris, through the early 20th-century fairs that introduced such American cities as St. Louis, Chicago, Buffalo, and San Francisco to the world, the starry-eyed futurism of the New York fair in 1939, and the coming-out parties of Seattle, (’62), Osaka (’70), Montreal (’67), and post-dictatorship Seville (’92) and Lisbon (’98), World’s Fairs announced that their host cities were open for business and a bright future was coming. Then they lost their luster? No, in fact — like so much manufacturing, they went to Asia. “How much optimism or innocence one might think World’s Fairs have lost,” writes Darran Anderson, “depends on how much one believes they had to begin with.”

Article source here:Arts Journal