Who's Afraid of Decorative Art?

In the history of global nineteenth-century art, decorative is often treated like a pejorative term. Even as scholars increasingly resist boundaries between ‘fine art’ and visual culture, the decorative arts are largely neglected or expressly avoided. Why maintain the exclusion of decorative objects, whose production, circulation, and reception are inextricable from the history of art? The exclusion of decorative art stems from its supposed inferiority within the hierarchy of visual media; its frequent elusiveness with respect to attribution; and its entanglements with industry, consumerism, and domesticity. Perhaps most importantly, the exclusion appears rooted in assumptions that decorative art is apolitical. Yet decorative objects—from porcelain to wallpaper to clocks—were a function of the artistic, social, and political developments of the nineteenth century. We invite submissions that explore how decorative arts offer a critical lens into the period’s complex sociopolitical currents, including (but not limited to) imperialism, slavery, technology, extraction, commerce, and collecting. As markers of status, wealth, luxury, taste, and style, how did objects and images considered decorative contribute to the formation of personal and collective identities? What kinds of intersectional issues were embedded in decorative objects? How did these objects shape conceptions of what constituted modernity in—and beyond—the Euro-American context? How did the decorative not only reflect but also influence global geopolitics?