Fashionable art

Owing to digitization, globalization and mass culture, what is deemed 'desirable' and 'of the moment' in art has increasingly followed the patterns of fashion. While in the past artistic styles were always inflected with signs of their modernity, today biennales and art markets are defined by the next big thing, the next sensation, the next new idea. But how do opinions of what is 'good', 'progressive' and 'cutting edge' guide styles? What is it that makes works of art fashionable and commercial? Fashionable Art critically explores the relationships between art, commerce, taste and cultural value. Each chapter covers a major style or movement, from Chinese and Aboriginal art, Cubism and Pop Art to alternative identity and outsider art, exploring how contemporary art has been shaped since the 1970s. Drawing upon a variety of theoretical frameworks, from Adorno and Bourdieu to Simmel and Zizek, expert visual cultural scholars Geczy and Millner engage with both historical and contemporary debates on this lively topic.0Taking a complex view of the meaning of fashion as it relates to art, while also offering critiques of 'art as fashion', Fashionable Art is an original, key text that will be essential reading for students and scholars of art history, fashion studies and material culture.

What is fashionable art? -- The artist as impresario, the artist as brand: from Baudelaire to Barney : Pre-modernism ; Dandies and the artist as the embodied work of art ; The artist-hero ; Artist as brand and go-between ; The end of the critic, the rise of the agent-dealer ; The artist as pure image: Matthew Barney -- 'Look at me I'm different!': identity art and the expectations of race : Transorientalism ; Basquiat: martyr of the exotic ; Global curating -- Exoticism at the brink: contemporary Chinese and aboriginal art : Aboriginal art and the dot ; Contemporary Chinese art -- Less is less: formlessness : L'informe ; Postmodern anti-aesthetics ; The critical value of formlessness -- Come fly with me: participatory art, interactivity and audience involvement : Relational aesthetics ; Critiques of relational aesthetics ; Broadening out participatory practices: community ; New community arts? -- Video art and videophilia : Activism and self: the 1970s and its fashion legacy ; The language of video, the found image and appropriation: the fashion legacy of the 1980s ; Installation and alternative spatial experiences: the 1990s and their fashion legacy ; Video and the return of narr…