Shiny Things combines an interest in visual art with a broad
attention to popular culture - the wideness of its range is
striking. It is more than just an expansion of subject matter,
which many of today's innovative books also have - it considers how
a specific physical property manifests itself in both art and
culture at large, and contributes to an analysis of and polemics
about the world. It is accessibly written but with a careful
application of contemporary theory. Interesting, informative, and
entertaining, this will appeal to progressive thinkers looking for
new ways of presenting ideas. This is scholarship that challenges
stale thought and interacts with philosophical ideas in real time,
with a versatility that can often be lacking in traditional
academic scholarship. Using art, especially contemporary art, as
its recurrent point of reference, the authors argue that shininess
has moved from a time when rarity gave shiny things a direct
meaning of power and transcendence. Shininess today is pervasive;
its attraction is a foundation of consumer culture with its
attendant effects on our architecture, our conceptions of the body,
and our production of spectacle. Power and the sacred as readings
of the shiny have given way to readings of superficiality, irony
and anxiety, while somehow shininess has maintained its qualities
of fascination, newness and cleanliness. Examines the meanings and
functions of shininess in art and in culture more generally: its
contradictions of both preciousness and superficiality, and its
complexities of representation; the way shininess itself is
physically and metaphorically present in the construction of major
conceptual categories such as hygiene, utopias, the sublime and
camp; and the way the affects of shininess, rooted in its inherent
disorienting excess, produce irony, anxiety, pleasure, kitsch, and
fetishism. All of these large ideas are embodied in the instantly
noticeable, sometimes precious and sometimes cheap physical
presence of shiny things, those things that catch our eye and
divert our attention. Shininess, then, is a compelling subject that
instantly attracts and fascinates people. The book engages
primarily with visual art, although it makes frequent use of
material culture, as well as advertising, film, literature, and
other areas of popular and political culture. The art world,
however, is a place where many of the affects of shininess come
into clearest focus, where the polemical semiotics of shine are
most evident and consciously explored. Artists as diverse as Anish
Kapoor (whose popular Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago is a
repeating example in the book), Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons,
Carolee Schneemann, Audrey Flack, Fra Angelico and Gerard ter Borch
centre the book in an art discourse that opens up to automobiles,
Richard Nixon and Liberace. Will be relevant to academics, scholars
and students with an interest in contemporary theory and material
and popular cultures. Potential interest across the humanities:
philosophy, gender studies, perhaps public relations, advertising
and marketing. It will also appeal to more general readers with an
interest in popular and material cultures, art and aesthetics. It
is written in a genuinely accessible style, and its ideas and
theory are embodied through examples and narratives. Will be of
interest to readers of Oliver Sacks, James Gleick, George Lakoff,
James Elkins or Rebecca Solnit.
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