This book offers a compelling perspective on the striking similarity of art and commerce in contemporary culture. Combining the history and theory of art with theories of contemporary culture and marketing, Maria A. Slowinska chooses three angles (space, object/experience, persona) to bridge present and past, aesthetic appearance and theoretical discourse, and traditional divisions between art and commerce. Beyond both pessimistic and celebratory rhetorics, »Art/Commerce« illuminates contemporary phenomena in which the aestheticization of commerce and the commercialization of aesthetics converge.

"To explain the logic of these arrangements, the author draws on the analytical resources of industrial economics and the theory of contracts. He addresses the winner-take-all character of many creative activities that brings wealth and renown to some artists while dooming others to frustration; why the "option" form of contract is so prevalent; and why even savvy producers get sucked into making "ten-ton turkeys," such as Heaven's Gate."--BOOK JACKET.

Just as the clothes we wear can communicate our personality and how we want to be perceived, so fashion can reflect the politics and preoccupations of the society that produced it. A Cultural History of Western Fashion guides you through the relationships between haute couture and ready-to-wear designer fashions, popular culture, big business, high-tech production, as well as traditional and social media. Exploring fashion's interdisciplinary nature, English and Munroe also highlight the parallel evolution of clothing design and the other visual arts over the last 150 years. This new edition includes expanded coverage of the build up to the First World War and brings this classic text up to date. There is also a new chapter on smart textiles and technology, exploring the work of Hussein Chalayan and Iris Van Herpen among others, and expanded coverage of the role of sustainability in the contemporary fashion industry, including biosynthetic textile production and Stella McCartney's use of vegan leather.

What is street art? Who is the street artist? Why is street art a crime? Since the late 1990s, a distinctive cultural practice has emerged in many cities: street art, involving the placement of uncommissioned artworks in public places. Sometimes regarded as a variant of graffiti, sometimes called a new art movement, its practitioners engage in illicit activities while at the same time the resulting artworks can command high prices at auction and have become collectable aesthetic commodities. Such paradoxical responses show that street art challenges conventional understandings of culture, law, crime and art. Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination engages with those paradoxes in order to understand how street art reveals new modes of citizenship in the contemporary city. It examines the histories of street art and the motivations of street artists, and the experiences both of making street art and looking at street art in public space. It considers the ways in which street art has become an integral part of the identity of cities such as London, New York, Berlin, and Melbourne, at the same time as street art has become increasingly criminalised. It investigates the implications of street art for conceptions of property and authority, and suggests that street art and the urban imagination can point us towards a different kind of city: the public city. Street Art, Public City will be of interest to readers concerned with art, culture, law, cities and urban space, and also to readers in the fields of legal studies, cultural criminology, urban geography, cultural studies and art more generally.