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This chapter traces the origins of the first Chicano arts organizations and explores how they combine art and commerce, two areas previously considered distinct and contradictory. Focusing on the period 1969–1978, the chapter illustrates how the earliest ventures operated with complex and nuanced views about commerce, politics, community, and the arts. It challenges notions in Chicana/o studies that dismiss commerce as antithetical to Chicano movement or community politics, and it finds that Mechicano Art Center and Goez Art Studios and Gallery exceed notions of civic and cultural engagement, inaugurated pedagogies now central in Chicana/o studies and arts institutions, and mapped a decolonial imaginary for Los Angeles.

How the impressionist optic persists apparently unchanged in the very different forms of contemporary painting by Peter Doig and Thomas Kinkade—one a cutting-edge post-conceptual artist, the other the “artist in the mall,” but both kitsch in ways that transform the meaning of that term.

This chapter examines how the arts flourished in Japan during the interwar period. It first considers a range of Japanese artists who began forming local avant-gardist associations at the beginning of the 1920s, with particular emphasis on Mavo and its impact on the contemporary art establishment as well as the art criticism of the period. It then discusses the growth of artistic endeavors, led by Mavo artists, following the Great Kantō Earthquake that struck Tokyo in 1923. It then turns to the Third Section Plastic Arts Association, or Sanka, and its activities in the art world, along with the rise of the proletarian arts movement whose members included artists sympathetic to socialism. It also looks at the emergence of commercial art as a field of artistic practice that explicitly put aesthetics in the service of commerce. Finally, it describes the modernist art of a group of commercial designers and photographers called Nippon Kōbō (Japan Studio).

This chapter examines the changing fortunes of art culture in Dundee from the late nineteenth century onwards. It attempts to explain its apparent decline in the twentieth century and subsequent renewal during the first few years of the twenty-first century. It argues that while artistic activity in the city continued unabated, the changing economic climate had a considerable impact on the nature of that activity. It also suggests that the increasing polarity of fine art and commercial art has led Dundee's success in the latter to be overlooked. Dundee is now establishing itself as a leader in the computer games industry, with graduates from both Duncan of Jordanstone College and the University of Abertay finding employment as artists and designers on some of the best-selling computer games in the country.

Born in 1922 in Richmond, Virginia, Nell Blaine was a rebellious only child, a loner fussed over by her mother. Her early years were plagued by serious vision problems, finally corrected in her teens. She was active in extracurricular clubs in both high school and college, where she encountered avant-garde art for the first time. Although she had to drop out of college after two years for financial reasons, she took an evening class in painting that helped her connect with new ideas in art. Meanwhile, she worked at an advertising agency, gaining experience that would stand her in good stead years later when she needed to earn a living. At age twenty, she left for Manhattan, ignoring the pleas and threats of her mother.

This chapter focuses on Hungarian director István Szabó's so-called Mitteleuropa trilogy: Mephisto (1981), Colonel Redl (1985), and Hanussen (1988). Szabó has protested against the widely held assumption that Mephisto, Colonel Redl, and Hanussen make up a trilogy. They nevertheless share a number of important elements, thematically, historically, stylistically and in terms of personnel. Whether taken as a whole or considered separately, these three feature films constitute a major cinematic examination, treatment and engagement with the individual and his or her place within the troubled history of Central Europe. The films are also a consolidation and development of the shift away from a mode of filmmaking which worked within and sometimes experimented with various forms of New Wave and modernist practices, to a more transparent and linear style which hovers somewhere between classical Hollywood, commercial art cinema, literary adaptation and, at times, historical costume drama.