The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions To A Theory Of Ornament
The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions To A Theory Of Ornament

Summary/Abstract: The concern for ornament might seem extravagant, if not obsolete and marginal. And yet, the impressive number of issues relating to this topic that came to light in recent decades testifies to the particular fascination it exerts upon the postmodern sensitivity. In its traditional acceptation, ornament was first theorized in the arts of language (rhetoric, poetics), and then in architecture. Its becoming a bone of contention marked the modern split between reason and sensitivity, the useful and the beautiful, structure and revetment. The effort to reconcile industry and the applied arts has kept ornament at the core of the aesthetic debate, and the end of the 19th century and the whole of the 20th century saw concomitantly its banishment and the revealing of entirely new understandings or modi operandi, together with an increased interest of philosophers, art theorists, anthropologists and sociologists. Most theorists agree that the question of ornament cannot be set in proper terms unless it is studied in a precise historical context since the significations, acceptations and functions of ornament are changing permanently.

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