Rethinking Decoration: Pleasure and Ideology in the Visual Arts

Portada
Cambridge University Press, 2005 M05 30 - 290 páginas
This book offers theoretical and practical reinterpretations of the decorative by addressing a neglected topic: the significance of decoration. Concerned with the central problem of taste, David Brett asks how individual pleasure and social function suffuse one another, drawing examples from architecture, fashion, textiles, ceramics, and the whole domain of visual and plastic arts. Using theoretical propositions derived from a critical approach to the concept of aesthetic experience, and from study of perceptual psychology and psychoanalytic theory, Brett focuses on historical instances of decoration and ornament significant to the development of a 'visual ideology'. He considers a variety of attempts at the rejection of decorative value, and proposes a 'poetics of workmanship', which deals with the metaphorical power of material processes.

Dentro del libro

Contenido

Introduction
1
Discourseexperience
13
w w w w www ww 8
28
Touching seeing
36
Thresholds transitions
76
Sociability pleasure
105
A corner seat in Lord Leightons House
159
Wollaton Hall south elevation
165
The refusal
184
Toward a poetics of workmanship
215
an afterword
251
Derechos de autor

Términos y frases comunes

Acerca del autor (2005)

David Brett is Emeritus Reader in the History of Design at the University of Ulster. He is the author of books on a variety of subjects including the history and theory of design, among them, The Plain Style in Protestant Theology in the History of Design and C. R. Mackintosh: The Poetics of Workmanship.

Información bibliográfica