Contemporary Art and the Home

The home is, for many people, the location for their most intense relationships with visual things. Because they are constructed through the objects we choose, domestic spaces are deeply revealing of a range of cultural issues. How is our interpretation of an object affected by the domestic environment in which it is placed? Why choose a stainless steel teapot over a leopard print one? How do the images hanging on the walls of our homes arrive there? In placing contemporary art in the context of the ordinary home, this book embarks on the contentious topic of whether high art impacts on ordinary people. What is the size and nature of the audience for contemporary art in Britain? Do people really visit more art galleries than attend football matches? What is the significance of the home in relation to such questions? Indeed, what constitutes art in the home? This book carefully unpicks these questions as well as the troubled relationship between the home as a place of comfort and reassurance and the often unsettling and challenging images offered by contemporary art. Within the art world, the home has been addressed as a subject and even used as a temporary gallery and a space for installations, and yet it is not common for works by todays avant-garde artists to be conceived and marketed to participate in the domestic lives that most people live. Handsomely illustrated, this book unites contemporary art, craft and design, with sociology, anthropology and cultural studies to provide an unusual and forthright addition to ongoing art and culture debates.

Colin Painter is Artist, Curator and Emeritus Professor at the Wimbledon School of Art