Grace McQuilten is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne, Australia looking at the relationship between art, money, and social enterprise. She is the founder and CEO of The Social Studio, a design-based social enterprise working with refugee youth. In 2011 she curated an exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art entitled Mis-design.
The Social Studio is a fashion label, café and social enterprise in Melbourne, Australia. Design is a vehicle to generate education and employment opportunities for young people with talent from refugee backgrounds. A retail shop sells beautifully crafted products made in-house and promotes sustainable and ethical fashion. Events and workshops … Continue reading →
While commercial appropriations are taken for granted in fashion and design, the field of visual art has always maintained at least a pretext of critical distance, if only in the guise of artistic freedom. Critical distance, in a contemporary context, is a matter of thinking critically about the convoluted culture that both artists and designers are currently implicated in, of harnessing the conceptual possibilities of creative practice without directing it toward a commercial outcome.Takashi Murakami’s artwork throws open this critical door and launches straight into the heart of commerce.
