Celebrates the generous gift of 100 works of art made by Charles Saatchi to the Arts Council Collection in spring 1999.

The Arts Council Collection is the largest national loan collection of postwar British art. This important reference book includes details and colour illustrations of every work acquired for the Collection between 1989 and 2002 and is the fourth volume in a comprehensive series of acquisition catalogues. - Features major figures who have attained international acclaim, including Tracey Emin, Richard Deacon, Douglas Gordon, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Rachel Whiteread, alongside emerging talents and lesser-known artists. - Works in all media are represented - painting, sculpture, photography, video, film and installation, original works on paper and prints and multiples.

Corporate sponsorship and business involvement in the visual arts have become increasingly common features of our cultural lives. From Absolut Vodka's sponsorship of art shows to ABN-AMRO Bank's branding of Van Gogh's self-portrait to advertise its credit cards, we have borne witness to a new sort of patronage, in which the marriage of individual talent with multinational marketing is beginning to blur the comfortable old distinctions between public and private. Chin-tao Wu's book is the first concerted attempt to detail the various ways in which business values and the free-market ethos have come to permeate the sphere of the visual arts since the 1980s. Charting the various shifts in public policy which first facilitated the entry of major corporations into the cultural sphere, it analyses the roles of governments in injecting the principles of the free market into public arts agencies-in particular the Arts Council in Great Britain and the National Endowment for the Arts in the USA. It goes on to study the corporate take-over of art museums, highlighting the ways in which 'cultural capital' can be garnered by various social and business 'elites' through commercial involvement in the arts, and shows how corporations have succeeded in integrating themselves into the infrastructure of the art world itself by showcasing contemporary art in their own corporate premises. Mapping for the first time the increasingly hegemonic position that corporations and corporate elites have come to occupy in the cultural arena, this is a provocative contribution to the debate on public culture in Britain and America.

A cultural history of the first truly modern art market, Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present furthers the burgeoning exploration of Britain's struggle to carve a niche for itself on the international art scene. Bringing together scholars from the UK, US, Europe, and Asia, this collection sheds new light on such crucial notions as the internationalization of the art market; the emergence of an increasingly complex exhibition culture; issues of national rivalry and emulation; artists' individual and collective strategies for their own promotion and survival; the persistent anti-commercialism of an elite group of art lovers and critics and accusations of philistinism levelled at the middle classes; as well as an unquestionable native British genius at reconciling jarring discourses. Essays explore the unresolved tension between artistic aspirations and commercial interest - a tension that has come to shape Britain's national artistic tradition - from the perspectives of artists, dealers and (super-) collectors, and the upwardly mobile middle classes whose consumerism gave rise to the British art market as it is known today. Specific case studies include Whistler, Roger Fry, Damien Hirst, and Charles Saatchi; essays consider art markets from London and Manchester to Paris and Flanders.

At the end of the twentieth century, Britain was a consumer society. Commerce, intoxicating and addictive, had almost entirely colonized modern life. People were immersed in, and ultimately defined by, promotional culture. The things they consumed had overtaken class, religion, geography, or occupation as the primary form of self-identity and self-expression. For much of the twentieth century all forms of brand communication- from political campaigning to product advertising- were based on the theory of rational appeals to rational consumers. There was only one problem with this theory: it was wrong. The Persuasion Industries: The Making of Modern Britain examines develops in marketing, advertising, public relations, and branding. It explores the role they played in the emergence of the consumer society. New ideas from fields of behavioural psychology and economics, together with internal developments such as planning, positioning, and corporate branding allowed persuasion to become the driving force within many commercial enterprises. Together these changes led to the emergence of an alternative emotional model of brand communication. A simple idea that proved so compelling it changed the world we live in.

Published on the occasion of the Arts Council Collection exhibition toured by National Touring Exhibitions from the Hayward Gallery, London for the Arts Council of England during 2002 and 2003.

In The Postmodern Animal, Steve Baker explores how animal imagery has been used in modern and contemporary art and performance, and in postmodern philosophy and literature, to suggest and shape ideas about identity and creativity. Baker cogently analyses the work of such European and American artists as Olly and Suzi, Mark Dion, Paula Rego and Sue Coe, at the same time looking critically at the constructions, performances and installations of Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys and other significant late twentieth-century artists. Baker's book draws parallels between the animal's place in postmodern art and poststructuralist theory, drawing on works as diverse as Jacques Derrida's recent analysis of the role of animals in philosophical thought and Julian Barnes's best-selling Flaubert's Parrot.