THE ASPECT OF THE FAIR: AESTHETICS AND FESTIVAL IN ILLINOIS COUNTY FAIRS

County fairs in Illinois offer people an opportunity to participate in a series of aesthetic processes. The county fair is a rural-based festive institution with urban connections, intended to further agricultural endeavor. In the judging and exhibition section, in particular, an elaborated and articulated series of critical judgments is developed and displayed. The fair provides a focussing vehicle for distilling participants\u27 critical judgments. These judgments are not relegated to a marginal position in peoples\u27 lives here; their decisions become essential to their existence. The fair is a set of unities that underlie the festival but that are not necessarily consciously perceived. Through time and space, elements have remained constant but have been worked out in each specific location and era according to the particular desire of the participating community. The history of fairs describes a little world temporarily constructed and set apart, whether in England, Europe, colonial America or twentieth century Illinois. The administrative construction of the contemporary Illinois county fair reveals the organization of that little world, where the community establishes its own values and makes room for those of others, where participants celebrate a distilled essence of agricultural life in resonance with other ways of life. The physical and temporal patterns reinforce those values and actions by composing an environment which reflects the aesthetic beliefs of the fair\u27s community. The making of categories, the preparation and judgment of exhibits, the establishment of criteria, and the use of those activities in everyday life all manifest correlations with each other and with the environmental structures of the fair. Finally, the notions of festival and art, or county fair and art gallery, discover unities of aesthetic characteristics which surface in the internal and external action. Within this action, the relationship between individual and community is one of continuous counterpoint. Each individual seldom plays one role. The people here have almost all been judges, exhibitors, patrons, and officials at one time in their career. They speak from many viewpoints and cross boundaries