Shopping A Century of Art and Consumer Culture

"Shopping" signifies more than the pure purchasing of goods. Strolling, looking at, choosing, buying and consuming goods has long become an essential part 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, film makers with the more and more 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 Abbot, 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 discussion of a topic so dear to all of us. (German edition available 3-7757-1213-5) The editor: Christoph Grunenburg is curator at the Tate Liverpool since 1999 after working at the Kunsthalle Basel and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. He has written extensively on the history of museums and installations and issues surrounding the presentation of art.