Downton Abbey, the Art Exhibition?

The appeal of the British drama/high-class soap opera Downton Abbey for American audiences has long been a subject of great speculation. Simon Schama called the show “cultural necrophilia” for bringing to life a time he saw as long dead and rightfully so for all its elitism and iron-clad class consciousness from the bottom up. A new exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art taps into American Downton-mania, but critiques as it celebrates. Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, which runs through June 2, 2013, collects the high fashion, flashy jewelry, and dazzling portraiture of a too-short age squeezed between two eras that make us today ask both too little and too much of the Edwardians. Is this “Downton Abbey, the Art Exhibition,” or is it much more? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Downton Abbey, the Art Exhibition?"

[Image: William Orpen, A Bloomsbury Family, 1907, oil on canvas, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Presented by the Scottish Modern Arts Association 1964.] 
[Many thanks to the Yale Center for British Art for providing me with the image above and other press materials related to Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, which runs through June 2, 2013.]