Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture

Shopping--the word nowadays signifies more than the mere purchasing of goods. From the Paris arcades to the suburban mall, buying has been an essential part of urban life throughout the 20th century. As a ritual, shopping has both created and transformed our identities. For artists, consumer meccas and all their forms of presentation have long been a source of inspiration and criticism. If Walter Benjamin's description of the flaneur in turn-of-the-century Paris was the turning point in our understanding of the complex interchanges between consumer society and art, the cultural productions that followed his theorizing hardly proved him wrong. Consider only Pop Art, a mode of art making created by a generation of artists who themselves were designers of advertising materials, and who used those same products as source material for work that now hangs in museums. Shopping is the first publication to be extensively devoted to this topic. It documents and analyzes the fascination and influence of the fine arts, architecture, film, and music on the aesthetics, structure, and environment of consumer culture. Numerous illustrations reveal the crossover work of artists like Eug ne Atget, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Christo, Duane Hanson, Barbara Kruger, Jeff Koons, Andreas Gursky, and others, as well as pieces conceived by fine artists, architects, and film makers. Complete with contributions by internationally renowned authors, Shopping serves as a diversified basis for the discussion of a topic more dear to us than most of us would admit. You simply must buy this book.