SHOPPING - A CENTURY OF ART AND CONSUMER CULTURE

SHOPPING

Shopping signifies more than the pure purchasing of goods. Strolling, looking at, choosing, buying and consuming goods have long become vital parts of urban life in the 20th century. Shopping is an essential ritual of public life, creating and transforming identity. Ever since Walter Benjamin's description of the flaneur in the Paris arcades, the complex interchanges between consumer culture and art have become an issue worthy of discussion, and the book Shopping is the first extensive publication to be dedicated to this topic. It documents and analyses the fascination of fine artists, architects, and film makers with the increasingly sophisticated means of seduction in shop windows, department stores and shopping arcades. Extensive pictorial material serves to illustrate the interaction between art and the consumption of goods, using works by Eugène Atget, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Christo, Duane Hanson, Barbara Kruger, Jeff Koons, Andreas Gursky, and many more. The book, edited by Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein, and with contributions by internationally renowned authors, provides a diversified basis for the discussion of a topic so dear to us all.

Exhibition Schedule: Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt/Main September 28 - December 1, 2002 Tate Liverpool December 20, 2002 - March 23, 2003

Now that Rem Koolhaas has firmly established consumer culture as the pre-eminent barometer of the age, shopping is the latest hot topic for architects, designers and artists. Ever since Surrealism, artists have used shopping to convey essential truths about our identities and social rituals: "Shopping" is a comprehensive overview of the cross-over between the world of art and the realm of commerce.
(Jonathan Bell, wallpaper December 2002)

The volume offers critical contributions by various authors [...] which serve to make the book more than a mere documentation of the exhibition and rather a supplementary examination of the theme at hand: Shopping.
(tema celeste 96, March/April 2003)