What Happened At Home With Art: Tracing the Experience of Consumers

Abstract

This chapter is based on eighteen in-depth interviews with people who purchased one or more items from the At Home With Art (AHWA) range in Homebase. It takes up Painter’s idea of ‘contagion’ as he deploys it in the catalogue to the AHWA exhibition and explores what it might mean, a compelling idea in our appreciation of objects. It is richly suggestive of a key dynamic in domestic taste—the idea that things simply speak to people without mediation. The chapter is concerned with the experiential side of the dialectic: the significances determined by respondents as they include AHWA pieces in their lives. Cummings nicely describes this interaction as ‘curating ourselves into being’– this idea is fundamental to this chapter, reliant on a material culture that extends well beyond the gallery and the university. In discussing curation and accommodation, there are themes: functionality and inevitability, negotiation and singularity, transformation and obstinacy in the objects.

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