Decorative and Applied Art

In this finely illustrated, major history of American and European art of the past quarter century, Irving Sandler shows how new directions in art emerged in the 1960s -- Post Minimal styles, Pattern and Decoration Painting, and New Image Painting -- through the 1980s -- Neo-Expressionism, Media Deconstruction, and Commodity Art. Sandler discusses the major and minor artists and their works, movements, ideas, attitudes, and styles, and places them in the social and cultural context of the period. He also covers Postmodernist art theory, the art market, and consumer society.

Fully documented and clearly written, Sandler's book is essential for understanding the art of this period.

Alfred Gell puts forward a new anthropological theory of visual art, seen as a form of instrumental action: the making of things as a means of influencing the thoughts and actions of others. He argues that existing anthropological and aesthetic theories take an overwhelmingly passive point of view, and questions the criteria that accord art status only to a certain class of objects and not to others. The anthropology of art is here reformulated as the anthropology of a category of action: Gell shows how art objects embody complex intentionalities and mediate social agency. He explores the psychology of patterns and perceptions, art and personhood, the control of knowledge, and the interpretation of meaning, drawing upon a diversity of artistic traditions--European, Indian, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Australian. Art and Agency was completed just before Alfred Gell's death at the age of 51 in January 1997. It embodies the intellectual bravura, lively wit, vigour, and erudition for which he was admired, and will stand as an enduring testament to one of the most gifted anthropologists of his generation.

By the 1930s the Liverpool School of Architecture was the most famous British school of architecture in the world, promoting modern architecture and city planning internationally. This book looks at the cultural environment in Liverpool at the turn of the twentieth century which enabled such an important institution to come to fruition. It examines attitudes towards design practice through the work of patrons, practitioners, institutions and theorists in the city, and considers the way their ideas were formed by national and international trends. From a city microcosm of contesting design aesthetics emerged a unique synthesis that was to exert a profound international influence in architectural and planning design.

The home is, for many people, the location for their most intense relationships with visual things. Because they are constructed through the objects we choose, domestic spaces are deeply revealing of a range of cultural issues. How is our interpretation of an object affected by the domestic environment in which it is placed? Why choose a stainless steel teapot over a leopard print one? How do the images hanging on the walls of our homes arrive there? In placing contemporary art in the context of the 'ordinary' home, this book embarks on the contentious topic of whether 'high' art impacts on 'ordinary' people. What is the size and nature of the audience for contemporary art in Britain? Do people really visit more art galleries than attend football matches? What is the significance of the home in relation to such questions? Indeed, what constitutes 'art' in the home?This book carefully unpicks these questions as well as the troubled relationship between the home as a place of comfort and reassurance and the often unsettling and challenging images offered by contemporary art. Within the art world, the home has been addressed as a subject and even used as a temporary gallery and a space for installations, and yet it is not common for works by today's avant-garde artists to be conceived and marketed to participate in the domestic lives that most people live.Handsomely illustrated, this book unites contemporary art, craft and design, with sociology, anthropology and cultural studies to provide an unusual and forthright addition to ongoing art and culture debates.