With this richly illustrated history of industrial design reform in
nineteenth-century Britain, Lara Kriegel demonstrates that
preoccupations with trade, labor, and manufacture lay at the heart
of debates about cultural institutions during the Victorian era.
Through aesthetic reform, Victorians sought to redress the
inferiority of British crafts in comparison to those made on the
continent and in the colonies. Declaring a crisis of design and
workmanship among the British laboring classes, reformers pioneered
schools of design, copyright protections, and spectacular displays
of industrial and imperial wares, most notably the Great Exhibition
of 1851. Their efforts culminated with the establishment of the
South Kensington Museum, predecessor to the Victoria and Albert
Museum, which stands today as home to the world's foremost
collection of the decorative and applied arts. Kriegel's
identification of the significant links between markets and
museums, and between economics and aesthetics, amounts to a
rethinking of Victorian cultural formation. Drawing on a wide range
of sources, including museum guidebooks, design manuals,
illustrated newspapers, pattern books, and government reports,
Kriegel brings to life the many Victorians who claimed a stake in
aesthetic reform during the middle years of the nineteenth century.
The aspiring artists who attended the Government School of Design,
the embattled provincial printers who sought a strengthened
industrial copyright, the exhibition-going millions who visited the
Crystal Palace, the lower-middle-class consumers who learned new
principles of taste in metropolitan museums, and the working men of
London who critiqued the city's art and design collections-all are
cast by Kriegel as leading cultural actors of their day. Grand
Designs shows how these Victorians vied to upend aesthetic
hierarchies in an imperial age and, in the process, to refashion
London's public culture.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
