Golden Places, Aesthetic Spaces: An Introduction to the Cultural Politics of Luxury

While the term cultural politics of luxury may be employed, generally, to denote all cultural and political features of the study of luxury, and as such may be taken to include the varied cultural and political ways in which luxury is comprehended and examined, for instance, in Continental philosophy, anthropology, phenomenology, and aesthetic criticism, it can also, more accurately, be taken to signify a distinctive and recently defined field of academic investigation. In this second usage, its contemporary origins can be traced to the work of Joanne Roberts and me, and therefore to the establishment of “critical luxury studies” (Armitage and Roberts 2014; 2016a; 2016b). From this initial body of cultural and political work, there is now arising a multidisciplinary critical approach to luxury, drawing not just on the conventional approaches originating in the humanities and business studies but also...