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Everyone who looks at contemporary art is familiar with galleries. But visual features of these mysterious temples tend to be taken for granted. The basic purpose of this book is to enliven the reader’s latent knowledge of galleries, including architectural motifs, the intended impression that is conveyed to the visitor, and human interactions within them. The contemporary art world system includes artists’ studios, art galleries, homes of collec-tors and public art museums. To comprehend art, one needs to understand these settings and how it travels through them. The contemporary art gallery is a store where luxury goods are sold. What distinguishes it from stores selling other luxuries – upscale clothing, jewelry, and posh cars – is the nature of the merchandise. While much has been written about the art, this book uncovers the secretive culture of the galleries themselves. The gallery is the public site where art is first seen – anyone can come and look for free. This store, a commercial site, is where aesthetic judgments are made. Art’s value is determined in this marketplace by the consensus formed by public opinion, professional re-viewers and sales. The gallery, then, is the nexus of the enigmatic, billion dollar art world, and it is that space that is dissected here. The first chapter briefly describes the beginnings of the present contemporary art gallery. The second presents the experience of gallery going, presenting summary accounts of vis-its to some contemporary galleries. The third expands and extends that analysis, with de-tailed close up descriptions and comparative evaluations of many diverse contemporary galleries, in order to identify the challenges provided by these marvelous places. Then the fourth chapter indicates why, in the near future, due to the proliferation of myriad art fairs and online platforms extant today, such galleries might disappear altogether.
"Contemporary art in the early twenty-first century is often discussed as though it were a radically new phenomenon unmoored from history. Yet all works of art were once contemporary to the artist and culture that produced them. In What Was Contemporary Art? Richard Meyer reclaims the contemporary from historical amnesia, exploring episodes in the study, exhibition, and reception of early twentieth-century art and visual culture.
Vitrines and glass cabinets are familiar apparatuses that have in large part defined modern modes of display and visibility, both within and beyond the museum. The twelve contributions to this volume examine some of the points of origin of the vitrine and the various relations it brokers with sculpture, first in the Wunderkammer and cabinet of curiosities and then in dialog with the development of glazed architecture beginning with Paxton's Crystal Palace (1851). The collection offers close discussions of the role of the vitrine and shop window in the rise of commodity culture and raises key questions about the nature and implications of vitrinous space.
The material for this book has been taken from the 2006 thesis, Frederick Kiesler’s Art of This Century in New York, (1942-1947), in the Context of the Twentieth Century Art Museum. The prime objective was to establish why so few people remember Art of This Century, which Kiesler designed for Peggy Guggenheim in 1942, and she ruthlessly closed in 1947. A second aim was to investigate why there has been so research carried out on the Gallery, when it was acknowledged as a work of art in its own right at the time of opening. Indeed, in 2004 Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim Foundation’s director expressed concern that due to the lack of research it might slip into oblivion. Such a statement raises questions as to why it has taken the Guggenheim Foundation over half a century to resurrect Art of This Century, in the form of two exhibitions held in Frankfurt and Venice, or instigate its own research. The book opens with an historical account of the development of the modern art museum, as well as an overview of Kiesler’s life and multidisciplinary oeuvre. His association with selected, contemporary architectural theorists, and architects is looked at to establish whether they had any influence on his eclectic thinking. This is followed by a summary of Kiesler’s manifesto, On Correalism and Biotechnique: A Definition of a New Approach to Building Design, 1937-1939. The main body of the work is a detailed description of Art of This Century. The notion that Kiesler’s innovative theories and designs might be better understood in a twenty-first century architectural context is finally explored. "This book finally restores Frederick Kiesler to his rightful place in the history of twentieth century art and architecture. By a careful analysis of his sometimes fraught collaboration with the mercurial Peggy Guggenheim, Haines-Cooke uncovers the fascinating story of Kiesler’s ground-breaking new vision for the display of abstract art – rendered all the more poignant by its significant yet largely subliminal influence on much of the best in recent museum and gallery architecture." —Dr Jonathan Hale, University of Nottingham
An exploration of the visual culture of “race” through the work of five contemporary artists who came to prominence during the 1990s. Over the past two decades, artists James Luna, Fred Wilson, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Pepón Osorio, and Renée Green have had a profound impact on the meaning and practice of installation art in the United States. In Subject to Display, Jennifer González offers the first sustained analysis of their contribution, linking the history and legacy of race discourse to innovations in contemporary art. Race, writes González, is a social discourse that has a visual history. The collection and display of bodies, images, and artifacts in museums and elsewhere is a primary means by which a nation tells the story of its past and locates the cultures of its citizens in the present. All five of the American installation artists González considers have explored the practice of putting human subjects and their cultures on display by staging elaborate dioramas or site-specific interventions in galleries and museums; in doing so, they have created powerful social commentary of the politics of space and the power of display in settings that mimic the very spaces they critique. These artists' installations have not only contributed to the transformation of contemporary art and museum culture, but also linked Latino, African American, and Native American subjects to the broader spectrum of historical colonialism, race dominance, and visual culture. From Luna's museum installation of his own body and belongings as “artifacts” and Wilson's provocative juxtapositions of museum objects to Mesa-Bains's allegorical home altars, Osorio's condensed spaces (bedrooms, living rooms; barbershops, prison cells) and Green's genealogies of cultural contact, the theoretical and critical endeavors of these artists demonstrate how race discourse is grounded in a visual technology of display.
An intriguing look at the changing roles of artists in modern America.
Designed to Sell presents an engaging account of mid-twentieth-century department store design and display in America from the 1930s to the 1960s. It traces the development of postwar philosophies of retail design that embodied aesthetics and function and new modes of merchandise display, resulting in the emergence of a new type of industrial designer. The evolution of aesthetics in department stores during this period reflected larger cultural shifts in consumer behaviour and lifestyle. Designed to Sell explores these changes using five key case studies and original archival sources to reveal the link between designers and consumption beyond the design of individual objects. It argues that design is not simply connected to retail consumption, but that it is capable of controlling how and where customers shop and what they are drawn to purchase. This book contextualises this discussion and brings it up to date for students and scholars interested in design, retail, and interior history.
An important part of the New Deal, the Modernization Credit Plan helped transform urban business districts and small-town commercial strips across 1930s America, but it has since been almost completely forgotten. In Modernizing Main Street, Gabrielle Esperdy uncovers the cultural history of the hundreds of thousands of modernized storefronts that resulted from the little-known federal provision that made billions of dollars available to shop owners who wanted to update their facades. Esperdy argues that these updated storefronts served a range of complex purposes, such as stimulating public consumption, extending the New Deal’s influence, reviving a stagnant construction industry, and introducing European modernist design to the everyday landscape. She goes on to show that these diverse roles are inseparable, woven together not only by the crisis of the Depression, but also by the pressures of bourgeoning consumerism. As the decade’s two major cultural forces, Esperdy concludes, consumerism and the Depression transformed the storefront from a seemingly insignificant element of the built environment into a potent site for the physical and rhetorical staging of recovery and progress.
Norman Bel Geddes has long been considered the 'founder' of American industrial design. During his long career he worked on everything from theatre design, world fairs and cars to houses and product and packaging design. Nicolas P. Maffei's magisterial biography draws on original material from the archive at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, and places Bel Geddes' work within the fast-changing cultural and intellectual contexts of his time. Maffei shows how Bel Geddes' futuristic but pragmatic style – his notion of 'practical vision' – was central to his work, and highly influential on the professional practice of American industrial design in general.