Rethinking Decoration: Pleasure and Ideology in the Visual Arts

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.

• Addresses the neglected topic of the nature and significance of decoration • Draws from a wide variety of examples including: architecture, fashion, textiles, ceramics, and the whole domain of visual and plastic arts • Considers attempts at rejecting decorative values, and proposes a ‘poetics of workmanship’

Introduction; 1. Discourse and experience; 2. Touching and seeing; 3. Thresholds and transitions; 4. Sociability and pleasure; 5. The refusal; 6. Toward a poetics of workmanship; 7. The task of rethinking: an afterword.