The Designed Object: Commercial Culture and the Global Market
Chapter 5 analyses how modern mass‐produced objects, especially the products manufactured and promoted by the German Werkbund, incorporated notions of place, memory and nature. The first wave of globalization, while giving rise to a marked cultural imperialism, also fostered a new preoccupation with cultural specificity in Germany. Vernacular prototypes and Arts and Crafts inspirations informed a new industrial commodity culture, and underpinned the success story of goods ‘made in Germany’. Challenging existing accounts of the Werkbund controversy (Werkbundstreit) of 1914, which have focused on the conflict between art and economics, the chapter draws attention to a subtly different rivalry between Muthesius, who saw authentic and rooted design as the cure for the loss of identity in modernism, and Osthaus, who saw the commercialization of culture as a way of democratizing modernity, and whose aesthetic programme took its inspiration from advertising and shop window displays.
Keywords: industrial design, commodities, consumption, Werkbundstreit, globalization, made in Germany, Muthesius, Osthaus
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .