Fashioning contemporary art: a new interdisciplinary aesthetics in art-design collaborations

ABSTRACT

A surge in creative collaboration between fine artists and fashion designers might be troubling the art world, but these mergers have prompted little debate within academic research in the visual arts. Various artists now work directly with fashion designers, and though often derided by the art press, the growth of inter-disciplinary collaboration reflects a shift in how art is perceived, especially in relation to popular culture. This discussion considers historical moments when fashion and art found common cause, but we view the distinctive qualities of recent collaborative ventures as an entrenchment of postmodernist aesthetics in both realms. Since the mid-twentieth century, art-fashion interplays have disorganised disciplinary boundaries, but they also illustrate the unsettling effects of neoliberalism on cultural production. By exploring the fashioning of contemporary art through the work of various artists and designers, including Matthew Barney, Vanessa Beecroft and Yayoi Kusama, we ask whether shared concerns in art and design around power, spectacle and the somatic might signal the emergence of a new interdisciplinary aesthetics.

KEYWORDS:

• Postmodernism
• authorship
• the body
• collaboration
• neoliberalism

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Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Nicola McCartney

Nicola McCartney is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies for the Fashion, Jewellery and Textiles programmes at Central Saint Martins, University of London, where she also works across Fine Art and for external institutions, such as the National Gallery. She has undertaken artistic residencies overseas and in the UK, including Yinka Shonibare MBE’s studio. She was an Associate Research Fellow in the History of Art Department at Birkbeck, University of London, where she also completed her PhD. Her monograph, Death of the Artist: art world dissidents and their alternative identities (2018) is published with IBTauris of Bloomsbury.

Jane Tynan

Jane Tynan is Assistant Professor of Design History and Theory in the Faculty of Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) in the Netherlands. She is series co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body and member of CLUE+ Research Institute for Culture, Cognition, History and Heritage at VU Amsterdam. Her current research concerns the politics of (self-) fashioning practices, new materialisms in social movements and various intersections of design and violence.