Fashionable Art

Adam Geczy and Jacqueline Millner · Bloomsbury Academic · March 2015 · Nominated, Art in Literature: Mary Lynn Kotz Award, Library of Virginia, 2016

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Using the paradigm of fashion, Fashionable Art offers an alternative history to modern and postmodern art, exploring how and why art becomes fashionable and commercial.

Owing to digitisation, globalisation, 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.

Taking 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.