Everyone who looks at contemporary art is familiar with galleries. But visual features of these mysterious temples tend to be taken for granted. The basic purpose of this book is to enliven the reader’s latent knowledge of galleries, including architectural motifs, the intended impression that is conveyed to the visitor, and human interactions within them. The contemporary art world system includes artists’ studios, art galleries, homes of collec-tors and public art museums. To comprehend art, one needs to understand these settings and how it travels through them. The contemporary art gallery is a store where luxury goods are sold. What distinguishes it from stores selling other luxuries – upscale clothing, jewelry, and posh cars – is the nature of the merchandise. While much has been written about the art, this book uncovers the secretive culture of the galleries themselves. The gallery is the public site where art is first seen – anyone can come and look for free. This store, a commercial site, is where aesthetic judgments are made. Art’s value is determined in this marketplace by the consensus formed by public opinion, professional re-viewers and sales. The gallery, then, is the nexus of the enigmatic, billion dollar art world, and it is that space that is dissected here. The first chapter briefly describes the beginnings of the present contemporary art gallery. The second presents the experience of gallery going, presenting summary accounts of vis-its to some contemporary galleries. The third expands and extends that analysis, with de-tailed close up descriptions and comparative evaluations of many diverse contemporary galleries, in order to identify the challenges provided by these marvelous places. Then the fourth chapter indicates why, in the near future, due to the proliferation of myriad art fairs and online platforms extant today, such galleries might disappear altogether.

"Contemporary art in the early twenty-first century is often discussed as though it were a radically new phenomenon unmoored from history. Yet all works of art were once contemporary to the artist and culture that produced them. In What Was Contemporary Art? Richard Meyer reclaims the contemporary from historical amnesia, exploring episodes in the study, exhibition, and reception of early twentieth-century art and visual culture.

Vitrines and glass cabinets are familiar apparatuses that have in large part defined modern modes of display and visibility, both within and beyond the museum. The twelve contributions to this volume examine some of the points of origin of the vitrine and the various relations it brokers with sculpture, first in the Wunderkammer and cabinet of curiosities and then in dialog with the development of glazed architecture beginning with Paxton's Crystal Palace (1851). The collection offers close discussions of the role of the vitrine and shop window in the rise of commodity culture and raises key questions about the nature and implications of vitrinous space.

This is a historically informed examination of architecture's perceived absence in surrealist thought, surrealist tendencies in the theories and projects of modern architecture, and the place of surrealist thought in contemporary design. This book represents current insights into surrealism in the thought and practice of modern architecture. In these essays, the role of the subconscious, the techniques of defamiliarization, aesthetic and social forces affecting the objects, interiors, cities and landscapes of the twentieth century are revealed. The book contains a diversity of voices from across modern art and architecture to bring into focus what is often overlooked in the histories of the modernist avant-garde. This collection examines the practices of writers, artists, architects, and urbanists with emphasis on a critique of the everyday world-view, offering alternative models of subjectivity, artistic effect, and the production of meanings in the built world.

An overview of structures designed to be mobile, their uses, and the principles involved in their design including a consideration of the wide range of applications in which they can be found.

An important part of the New Deal, the Modernization Credit Plan helped transform urban business districts and small-town commercial strips across 1930s America, but it has since been almost completely forgotten. In Modernizing Main Street, Gabrielle Esperdy uncovers the cultural history of the hundreds of thousands of modernized storefronts that resulted from the little-known federal provision that made billions of dollars available to shop owners who wanted to update their facades. Esperdy argues that these updated storefronts served a range of complex purposes, such as stimulating public consumption, extending the New Deal’s influence, reviving a stagnant construction industry, and introducing European modernist design to the everyday landscape. She goes on to show that these diverse roles are inseparable, woven together not only by the crisis of the Depression, but also by the pressures of bourgeoning consumerism. As the decade’s two major cultural forces, Esperdy concludes, consumerism and the Depression transformed the storefront from a seemingly insignificant element of the built environment into a potent site for the physical and rhetorical staging of recovery and progress.