Art in Consumer Culture: Mis-Design

Written with beautiful clarity, Art in Consumer Culture: Mis-Design asks the contemporary art world to be honest about the pervasive effects of commodification and the difficulty of staging critique. The book examines the collusion of 'art' and 'design' in contemporary artistic practices in order to find avenues of critique in a commercially driven cultural landscape. Grace McQuilten focuses on the work of Takashi Murakami, Andrea Zittel, Adam Kalkin and Vito Acconci, four contemporary artists who claim to be working in the field of design rather than the traditional art world. McQuilten argues that Zittel, Acconci and Kalkin engage with 'design' only to reactivate the critical practice of art in a more direct engagement with capital - and conceives of and affirms a future for art, outside of the art world, as a parasite in the complex beast of late capitalism. This book is an important and timely provocation to a cynical and apathetic consumer culture, and a call to arms for creative freedom and critical thought.

Art in Consumer Culture

Arts & Photography

McQuilten, Grace

History & Criticism

Routledge

Art as Enterprise: Social and Economic Engagement in Contemporary Art

Bloomsbury Visual Arts

Written with beautiful clarity, Art in Consumer Culture: Mis-Design asks the contemporary art world to be honest about the pervasive effects of commodification and the difficulty of staging critique. The book examines the collusion of 'art' and 'design' in contemporary artistic practices in order to find avenues of critique in a commercially driven cultural landscape. Grace McQuilten focuses on the work of Takashi Murakami, Andrea Zittel, Adam Kalkin and Vito Acconci, four contemporary artists who claim to be working in the field of design rather than the traditional art world. McQuilten argues that Zittel, Acconci and Kalkin engage with 'design' only to reactivate the critical practice of art in a more direct engagement with capital - and conceives of and affirms a future for art, outside of the art world, as a parasite in the complex beast of late capitalism. This book is an important and timely provocation to a cynical and apathetic consumer culture, and a call to arms for creative freedom and critical thought.

Art is produced, circulated, consumed and disseminated within an economic system - it depends on money for its creation, for the livelihood of its makers, and for its distribution. In this sense, art can be understood as an enterprising activity. However, profit-making is rarely the primary goal of artists, and indeed the entanglement of art with enterprise generates significant aesthetic, conceptual, philosophical and ethical challenges for contemporary art practice. Social enterprise has emerged from this complex terrain with the promise of an alternative model of economic organisation in the arts. Grace McQuilten and Anthony White argue that artists can, and have, engaged critically in the commercial market, by way of this model. Art as Enterprise brings a fresh perspective to the debate about the roles of contemporary art in consumer capitalist society.

Art as Enterprise: Social and Economic Engagement in Contemporary Art (International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art)

White, Anthony

I.B.Tauris

' Variation' is a term that embraces difference, and is core to the excitement and uniqueness of art practice. This book gives much-deserved attention to the work of artists with exceptional and varied lived experiences - including neurodiversity, diverse mental health, incarceration, and refugee, migrant and Muslim backgrounds - to transform how we understand contemporary visual art. The book' s goal is recognising, appreciating and analysing artistic variation - a process in which artists' voices are central to their stories, including how their lives and works are presented, discussed, framed and theorised. The essays, profiles and images in this hardback, lavishly illustrated volume have been co-produced, and in many cases co-authored, with artists and writers who have direct lived experience of social and cultural variation. These profiles include short texts, many written by the artists themselves, accompanied by high-quality reproductions, to ensure the text is accessible to a range of readers. Interspersed between these profiles is a series of longer texts, co-authored by artists and writers, to provide a layered understanding of the contexts in which the works might be understood. These include essays and interviews that address questions of structural and social marginalisation, while exploring the important role of collectives, supported studios and arts organisations.To understand art-making in Australia, it is essential to listen to the voices of artists who live complex forms of social diversity. Engagingly written and beautifully produced, this book introduces readers to a new picture of contemporary Australian art. Some of the artists featured include:Melbourne-based Lisa Reid is one of over 150 artists at Arts Project Australia, a supported studio that has been working with neurodiverse artists since 1974. Reid' s painting and drawing, characterised by humour and a highly distinctive graphic style, has attracted attention from private collectors as well as institutions, including the National Gallery of Victoria and Canberra' s National Gallery of Australia.Safdar Ahmed is a Sydney-based artist, musician and academic, and a founding member of the Refugee Art Project. This organisation was initially founded to facilitate art workshops for people incarcerated in Villawood detention centre and to amplify their voices through exhibitions and self-published zines.Colombian-born Javier Lara-Gomez began making architectural models out of salvaged materials while incarcerated at Sydney' s Long Bay Correctional Complex during the 1990s. As the artist noted, as he worked, he was ' bringing to life the dream that goes through my mind always when I think about my lovely family' .Geelong-born, Sydney-based artist Wart explores the experience of diverse mental health and the impact of institutionalisation in her art. Of the expressionistic works in her 2019 exhibition, ' Unravelling Moments in a Torn Mind' , Wart explained: ' they' re showing totally how screwed up you can be through colour and shape and mis-forming that shape.' Helen Sheferaw, who came to Australia from Ethiopia, has worked as a printmaker and designer with the support of not-for-profit printmaking studio The Ownership Project and The Social Studio, a fashion social enterprise. Her work documents the hope and trauma of the refugee migration experience, along with a celebration of her Ethiopian culture, from a deeply Christian perspective. Kamilaroi artist Frances Castles was taught by her grandmother in Walgett, New South Wales, to harvest and weave local river grasses. When Castles began working with The Torch, an organisation that supports Indigenous ex-offenders to connect with their culture and create art, she began to nourish knowledge and teach younger Indigenous women how to weave. With her woven baskets and textiles Castles wants a broader audience to ' get a sense of what this country is and what the culture is really about' .

Variations: A More Diverse Picture of Contemporary Art

Harwood, Tristen

Monash University Publishing

This book analyses the challenges and opportunities faced by art-based social enterprises (ASEs) engaging young creatives in education and training and supporting their pathways to the creative industries. In doing so, it addresses the complex intersecting issues of marginality and entrepreneurship, particularly in relation to young creatives from socially, economically and culturally diverse backgrounds. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with twelve key organisations, and three in-depth case studies in Australia, the book offers a detailed analysis of using enterprise to engage with the structural challenges of marginality. The book explores the local and global contexts through which art-based social enterprises (ASEs) operate and within which they attempt - often successfully - to improve access to education and work for emerging creatives. It also attends to the findings generated through engaging with the lived experiences of the staff and young creatives involved in our ASE case studies, in order to understand both the challenges and impacts of the ASE model on young people's education, training, and employment pathways. The book focuses on three broad themes; precarious youth and digital futures, material practice and sustainable economies, and cultural citizenship in the urban fringe. In exploring these themes, the book contributes to debates about the limits, possibilities and challenges that attach to, and emerge from, an ASE model and highlights the ways in which these models can contribute to young people's well-being, engagement, education and training, and work pathways. More broadly, it examines the possibilities of art as a means of social and cultural engagement. In the context of the precarious future of the creative industries, this book emphasise the ways in which young artists are building alternative economic and cultural models that support both individual pathways and collective change.&nbsp; This book will move the field forward with a critical lens that engages closely with experience and the lived realities of juggling multiple priorities of social, economic and artistic goals.

Art-Based Social Enterprise, Young Creatives and the Forces of Marginalisation

Politics & Social Sciences

Kelly, Peter

Humphery, Kim

Spiers, Amy

Sociology

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

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