Exotic A fetish for the foreign - Judy Sund - Phaidon Press - relié - Beau livre

Exotic explores our obsession with the lure of distant lands and their promise of the weird and wonderful, the beautiful and grotesque. Through a host of evocative images, this book shows how the absorption of 'the foreign,' through arts, design, architecture, and other cultural elements, has consistently enriched Western society, contributing to it cultural dynamism and artistic energy. Exotic's focus is especially relevant to the modern globalized world in which our engagement with cultures and traditions from around the globe is easier - and potentially more fraught - than ever before. 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,