Describes how late Victorian culture encouraged the evolution of art as a career, discussing such "inventions" as art therapy and bohemianism, and exploring artists' complicated and confused gender roles
The first striking thing about this book is its elegant dust jacket made to look like a copper plate. But the eye candy stretches past the front cover, nearly every page with either color illustrations or distinctive frames, fleurons, and figures around the text. Not surprising to those who've taken some literature classes, the annotations following a page of text are often far longer than whatever bit of text they illustrate. But if the reader should find academicism beside the point, annotations are easy to skip because Baum's story is written in larger type. This edition is for both kids and kiddie litters, the latter interested in such tidbits as the Dorothy-type farmgirl character called Dot, Dolly, and Doris in other works by Frank Baum, and the reigning theory that Dorothy lived in Kansas, yes, but more specifically, Topeka. Reprinted from the 1900 edition with many of the original drawings by W.W. Denslow. Oversize: 9.5x10.5". Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Situated at the crossroads of visual culture and consumerism, this essay collection examines visual merchandising as both a business and an art. It seeks to challenge that scholarly ambivalence that often celebrates the spectacle but denies the agenda of consumerism. The volume considers strategies in the imaging of selling from the mid nineteenth century to the present, in terms of the visual interaction that occurs between the commodity and the consumer and between body and space. Under the categories of Promotion, Product and Place, contributors to the volume examine the strategies in the presentation of retail goods and environments that range from print advertising to product design to store display and architecture. Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling is located directly at the nexus of business practice and cultural myth, where the spectator never loses sight of their status as buyer and the object of desire is always still a commodity.
Swartz reminds us in that various stage and screen dramatizations of Baum's story preceded and influenced the 1939 film. This richly illustrated book contains many rare photographs, film stills, sketches, theater programs, and movie advertisements from the different productions. Piecing together the Chicago and Broadway stage productions (1902-3) from contemporary reviews, surviving script pages, and published song lyrics, Swartz shows how Baum and his many collaborators worked to transform the book into a popular theatrical attraction -- often requiring significant alterations to the original story.
This book provides the first comprehensive history of window display as a practice and profession in Britain during the dynamic period of 1919 to 1939. In recent decades, the disciplines of retail history, business history, design and cultural history have contributed to the study of department stores and other types of shops. However, these studies have only made passing references to window display and its role in retail, society and culture. Kerry Meakin investigates the conditions that enabled window display to become a professional practice during the interwar period, exploring the shift in display styles, developments within education and training, and the international influence on methods and techniques. Piecing together the evidence, visual and written, about people, events, organisations, exhibitions and debates, Meakin provides a critical examination of this vital period of design history, highlighting major display designers and artists. The book reveals the modernist aesthetic developments that influenced high street displays and how they introduced passers-by to modern art movements.
Contemporary criticism, interviews, scholarly reassessments, and texts by the artist focusing on Claes Oldenburg's sculptures, installations, and multimedia performances between 1960 and 1965. Claes Oldenburg (born in 1929) is largely known today as a pop art sculptor. Oldenburg himself described his formless canvas and vinyl soft sculptures—gigantic hamburgers and ice cream cones, cushiony toilets and typewriters—as “objects that elude definition.” This collection of writings revisits not only Oldenburg's soft objects from the early to mid 1960s but also his pioneering installations The Street (1960) and The Store (1961–1962) and his often overlooked multimedia performances. As the artist translated his ideas and beliefs into various media and formats, his work drew on a range of styles and schools, including abstract expressionism, Happenings, pop art, minimalism, and postminimalism. Perhaps because of their refusal to be classified, these artworks are as contemporary today as they were when they were created between 1960 and 1965. This collection serves both as a summation of early critical thinking on Oldenburg's art and a starting point for consideration of the artist as a forerunner of current art trends of stylelessness and intermediality. It includes both contemporary criticism and more recent scholarly reassessments, interviews with the artist, and Oldenburg's own unpublished manifesto on the Ray Gun Theater (the artist's name for his performance series in the back of The Store).
In May 1906, the Atlantic Monthly commented that Americans live not merely in an age of things, but under the tyranny of them, and that in our relentless effort to sell, purchase, and accumulate things, we do not possess them as much as they possess us. For Bill Brown, the tale of that possession is something stranger than the history of a culture of consumption. It is the story of Americans using things to think about themselves. Brown's captivating new study explores the roots of modern America's fascination with things and the problem that objects posed for American literature at the turn of the century. This was an era when the invention, production, distribution, and consumption of things suddenly came to define a national culture. Brown shows how crucial novels of the time made things not a solution to problems, but problems in their own right. Writers such as Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Henry James ask why and how we use objects to make meaning, to make or remake ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears, and to shape our wildest dreams. Offering a remarkably new way to think about materialism, A Sense of Things will be essential reading for anyone interested in American literature and culture.