Luca Cottini - The Art of Objects: The Birth of Italian Industrial Culture, 1878-1928

The Art of Objects explores the initial stages of the Italian industrial project, against the political, social, and cultural background of post-unification Italy in the fifty years between the Universal Exposition of Paris in 1878 and Gi Pontis first theorization of industrial design in 1928. By combining the perspective of the arts and industry, this volume offers a comprehensive account, not bound to any political periodization, of the creative workshop of Italys industrial culture. By bridging the parallel (and often unrelated) fields of Italian studies and design studies, this work also proposes a novel and broader vision of Italys transition to industrial modernity, from post-Risorgimento to early Fascism.

The study asserts both the existence and the relevance of early Italian industrialism (often discarded or overlooked because of its irregular evolution), through the observation of the ages extraordinary concatenation of scientific and technological advances vis--vis contemporary culture. By deliberately tracing a visible link between industrial innovations and their related effects (in the material conditions of living and in the inner psychology of modern man),

As an alternative to the compartmentalized histories of the age individually focused on its new technologies, media (e.g., photography, cinema, radio), products (e.g., collectors handbooks), art, or literature this cultural study aims to open up a multidimensional vision of the new world of objects (Baudrillard 3) that was brought forth by industrialism, through the experimental synthesis of its many perspectives. This broad overview of the period offers a complex narrative of Italys path to modernization, thus overcoming the exclusive reliance on one singular field of inquiry and, for the first time, including industrialism as a relevant factor in understanding the nations modernity. Far from compiling an impossible compendium of the age or an analytical study of all its artefacts in different fields, this investigation of the early contacts between industrial production and intellectual life reveals the different and often hidden hermeneutics of Italys transition to modernity. This is accomplished in two main ways. First, against the back-drop of Italys political, social, and intellectual history, the book reconstructs the irregular nature of the Italian industrial venture through fragmentary symbolic episodes and exemplary cases revealing the interplay of high-, middle-, and lowbrow cultures. Second, it attempts to bridge the research in Italian literary or cultural studies (which have often overlooked the impact of material cultures on Italys modern identity) and the investigation of design studies (which have often failed to see the influence of high culture on the evolution of new industrial forms).

In the field of Italian studies the advent of industrialization and the formation of new industrial languages (e.g., photography, cinema, advertising, and design) have been traditionally considered as secondary or even degenerating factors in Italys cultural life. The influence of Benedetto Croces aesthetic purism and his peremptory condemnation of the early industrial age as a period of political crisis and intellectual decadence that created the abnormal form of Fascism in Italy (as postulated a posteriori in his 1928