Exotic: A Fetish for the Foreign

(Hardback)

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"Exotic is an illustrated survey of Western civilization's eternal love affair with the artistic exotica of other cultures. Ranging from antiquity to the present, this book explores our fascination with the lure of distant lands and their promise of the weird and wonderful, the beautiful and grotesque. More importantly, it shows how the absorption of foreign arts, design, architecture and other cultural mores has consistently enriched Western society, bringing cultural dynamism and artistic energy.

This book explores artistic projects and practices involving the exotic in architecture, paintings, sculpture and the decorative arts, and extending to fashion, film and body art. The 'exotic', as it is styled by Westerners for Western consumption - from Maori tattoos to Turkish tulips, from Chinese silks to Venetian glass - has been used as a tool for millennia to promote and enhance home-grown art and culture, to sell commodities and political and religious agendas, and to portray a people as cosmopolitan and enterprising. This book is the first image-driven survey of the subject for a general audience and is particularly germane to today's globalized world, increasingly wary of engagement with erstwhile exotic places and people.

From the ancient Greek fascination with 'Ethiopians', to Columbus's voyages to the Americas, from chinoiserie and Egyptomania to Gauguin in Polynesia, from Picasso's love of 'primitive' art to Jimmie Durham's post-modernist 'savages', this book explores our enduring love of the exotic, in which strange becomes commonplace."

Reviews

"[Sund] argues with wit, intelligence and myriad examples, from the erudite to the pop, in this gorgeously illustrated book... Captivating."1stdibs Introspective Magazine

"A new book by Phiadon about our enduring love affair with the exotic and the strange in art and design."Cover magazine

"In our increasingly globalized world, the book serves as a fascinating reminder of how art has served as a tool of cultural assimilation."Artnet

Author Bio

Judy Sund is Professor of Modern European Art and Art of the Americas at the City University of New York. In addition to constructions of the exotic in Euro-American visual culture, her research interests include artists' responses to texts (from Biblical psalms and parables to Naturalist novels) and intersections of high art and popular culture (world's fairs, Hollywood movies, advertising campaigns, fashion). She has published books and essays on Vincent van Gogh (including Van Gogh, in Phaidon's Art & Ideas series) as well as articles on Antoine Watteau, Mary Cassatt, Fernand Lger, Frida Kahlo, and twentieth-century appropriations of Pre-Columbian artefacts.