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Reading 1FROM GALLERIES TO GRAFFITI CRN-80832-201903 Course Home Page ... Module 3 & 4

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Reading 1

 

 

 

  200 One Dollar Bills by Andy Warhol (1962) which in November of 2009 raked in $43.8 million at a

Reading 1 Market System and Community Based art

“Art is not, after all, what we thought it was; in the broadest sense it is hard cash. The whole of art, its growing tip included, is assimilated to familiar values. Another decade, and we shall have mutual funds based on securities in the form of pictures held in bank vaults.”

– Art critic and art historian Leo Steinberg on the state of art in 1968.

This is a long and somewhat complicated reading, but please work through it carefully, as it helps us to establish an important, if sometimes subtle distinction between the modes of art we’ll be addressing for the remainder of this course.  Please pose any and all questions you might have on this material on the discussion board.   While completing this material please take notes on key ideas, themes, and facts, as these will be helpful to you both in aiding your major research project, and in preparation for your �nal exam.  

My Blackboard Community Zhongfu Liu 12

Sotheby’s auction.  

Market system art: use value and exchange value   We can think of the art market in its relationship to the metaphor whence it gets its name: the market. The market is where one would go to trade some thing for some other thing. This might mean trading milk for textiles, beets for beef, or it might mean trading gold for pottery, a paper note for a hammer.   The items I’ve used in my example here have at least two di�erent types of value: use value, and exchange value (this de�nition borrows from traditional de�nitions and from Marxist de�nitions of the market economy). You can use a hammer to erect your barn, or to, say, set a nail upon which to hang a picture. A hammer has use value. So too then does milk, a pot, or swatch of cloth from which to fashion a shirt, etc.   A paper note, like a �ve dollar bill, has what is called exchange value. There is nothing about a piece of coloured paper with an old prime minister printed on it, besides perhaps a quaint patriotism, that should make it worth any more than a discarded cigarette carton on the side of the road: indeed, at least on the blank side of packet of cigarettes one could write a laundry list— try doing the same on a one-hundred-dollar bill! Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine oneself thanking one’s lucky stars for stumbling upon an empty packet of Marlboros the way one might upon �nding a homeless scrap of paper depicting Sir Robert Borden.   Exchange value, then, is what you are able to get for something. Let’s look at textiles as an example of something that has a value in terms of both exchange and use (to be clear: hammers, and money also have both forms of value to varying degrees). Cloth (another word for textile) can be fashioned into a shirt, but it can also be decorated, embroidered, brocaded, histories can be printed upon it, a pattern or image or symbol or brand name can be emblazoned upon it; all of these things that can be done to a shirt  can signi�cantly alter its exchange value. A shirt, covers your skin,

protects you from the weather, etc. This is its use. The fact that a shirt can be sold for two dollars at a Value Village, or $200 at couture shop on Queen, or that a traditional garment might be taken to be  a ‘priceless’ exhibit in a museum shows the sharp contrast between use and exchange value.   All art is quite useless   Irish playwright, poet, and humourist Oscar Wilde, in the preface to his popular novel The Picture of Dorian Gray famously wrote: “All art is quite useless.” While we shall see where this claim is not the case with all art (especially, for instance with community based art), for many, this idea about art does ring resoundingly true— even if the sense in which Wilde thought art should be useless is not quite that which is popularly held. Why is it that we think of art as useless? Why is making art not considered labour? Why is it considered a luxury for the wealthy to pay for, and to be �rst on the chopping black when government spending must be cut? One reason this might be the case is the perceived in�ated exchange value of certain works of art.  

The emergence of market system art   Although the value of a work has long been linked to its cost it is subsequent to the Second World War that the exchange value and the price a work fetches as a commodity began to a�ect the value of the work as art. This shift results from the emergence of the art market and has to some extent to do both with the turn away from

traditional formal and canonical values from the late 19th-century on and the decline of the patronage system..   A number of changes began to take place in the European art world

of the late 19th-century. The traditional subjects of art and the way that art was made were changing in a way that they hadn’t since perhaps the time of the Italian Renaissance or the Dutch Golden Age

of painting. One such change saw the turn away from representational forms of art to more abstract forms, such as impressionism. This change was no doubt hastened by mechanical forms of reproduction such as the daguerreotype and photography. Representational forms of art such as landscape and portrait painting began to seem less valuable when one could simply aim a camera at a person or scene and snap picture. Traditional technical values were traded in for experiments in representation that challenged the very basis of traditional and canonical art work. The upshot of this turn away from tradition was that the very values that had once sponsored art and the meaning it had could no longer be depended upon to be criterion against which a great work of art was measured. If you wish to challenge the very idea of painting as the old masters did, then how can you be judged by such standards?   While some of this new work did �nd favour with the art buying elite, it was the arbiters of taste themselves, the rich, and those who bought art for the rich, who began to play a major role in establishing the value of a work of art. It is in this way that market economy and the so-called laws of supply and demand began to play a major role in what art was.   So, when tradition no longer dictates the value of art, the market, and the art work’s exchange value, comes to do just this. The work of Andy Warhol is considered to be important, valuable, an example

of 20th-century art at its best. But what transformed Warhol from a person who decorated department store windows, and illustrated fashion magazines to a world class artist? Some would argue that this was due at least in part to his work beginning to fetch massive prices.   In a recent Sotheby’s auction Andy Warhol’s 200 One Dollar Bills, a silkscreened image of 200 one dollar bills stacked in a grid, fetched $43.8 million; you’ve read correctly, a bit of cloth, stretched across a softwood frame, decorated in manner that a homemade t-shirt might be, and depicting a number of notes (themselves almost

arbitrarily ascribed value) cost as much as it might to feed, clothe and shelter several hundred Canadian families for a year. The use of those materials, then, is not re�ected in their cumulative exchange value. Art as a commodity is made valuable by what you can get for it, and as traditional art forms are increasingly marginalized market based art and its exchange value comes to dictate what makes the art good.   Who pays for art’s work?: patronage system   Art has traditionally been paid for by the moneyed classes. The word ‘patron’ itself comes from the Roman Catholic tradition, where a pope would o�er an artist a certain amount of money to complete certain works on the behalf of the church. This money would not only pay for the work, but would support the artist in his life in general (until perhaps the last few centuries or so women have been largely excluded from being or acknowledged as artists). Versions of such patronage of the arts are evidenced in ancient Roman, and Southeast Asian cultures as well as in feudal Japan, but we see it �ourish in Europe in particular during the Renaissance. Through the patronage system, not only the very wealthy representatives of the papacy, but too kings, noblemen, and eventually successful merchants could pay to support the sort of art, and the sort of artists they saw �t.   It is in this sense that art has for centuries been dictated to and directed by the wealthy classes. It is noteworthy to point out that the services of such artists were frequently bought and paid for by the sort of people who’d gotten their money in less that honourable ways including colonialism and war pro�teering; the art the money paid for was meant to purify these ill-begotten funds not only by ennobling the patrons in the work of art, but by turning the dirty money into immortal works of art.  

The grant system  

While the patronage system has not totally disappeared in the contemporary art world, in Canada it has largely been supplanted by the market system and the granting system.   Private organizations and governments (such as the Canadian government) o�er grants. A grant is a sum of money given to an artist or artists to complete a given work. This sum of money can vary dramatically, ranging typically from a few hundred to several thousand dollars.   Generally speaking, an artist or group of artists will apply for a grant, detailing the project she or he has in mind, and a jury made up of representatives from that organization will decide which projects should be sponsored and which not. These grants are good, because, in theory, they allow an artist to pursue her own work on her own terms.   This does not always happen in practice, however. As Mcleod suggested in our readings from week one, governments such as those run by Mike Harris, and in more recent years Stephen Harper, have sought to cut arts funding and to alter the infrastructure of the granting process. This is signi�cant for a couple of reasons: with less money going to the arts via the granting system, artists who will make a living, and therefore continue to make work, will tend to respond to the needs and wants of the market. So, just as artists in the patronage system worked to ennoble the people who paid them to work, successful market system artists will cater to the desires of the market values or tastes that will allow them to live and eat. Besides curtailed funding, the makeup of the juries who o�er government grants is also of consequence. Such juries decide who gets funding and for which projects. This is why, as Macleod points out in our module 1 readings, it is important to have labour represented in the decision making processes of our art and cultural institutions, so that the stories, themes, and concerns of the classes who cannot pay to be represented, are able to be by other means.  

Whose art is it?   Michelangelo, whose work in the famous Sistine Chapel is considered by some commentators to be the most iconic work of art in the world beside Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (a painting depicting the wife of a famous patron), was not only all but forced by the war-mongering art patron Pope Julius II to complete the work in the lavish chapel, but, as was traditionally done, he included at regular intervals the acorn, a symbol of the Sixtus family, after whom the chapel was named and of which Pope Julius II was a member. A more dramatic illustration of the impact of Pope Julius II’s in�uence on Michelangelo’s work can be seen in the image St. Zacharia painted directly above where the Pope’s throne would have been. Zacharia, a bible �gure, is painted to look exactly like Pope Julius II himself. In this way Pope Julius II resides not only over the immortal chapel itself, but to the biblical subject it immortalizes.   In the same way that the patronage system can dramatically impact upon the work of the artists it supports, so too does the market system. Artists such as Je� Koons and Damien Hirst are in today’s art world equivalent to the Drakes, Justin Biebers, and Madonnas of today’s music scene: they are popular, and they are big time. Je� Koons, who was in his early career, perhaps not surprisingly, a Wall Street commodities broker, produces work which regularly fetches prices in the millions.   Dismissed by some critics as expensive trinkets, the presence of his work in such internationally renowned galleries as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is justi�ed by some apologists as being precisely representative of the commercialism of our late- capitalist moment: in this sense Koons’ work (as is perhaps Warhol’s work, and speci�cally his 200 One Dollar Bills) functions as an homage to the market economy in its relationship to art— in one sense,  the meaning of the work is the price it fetches as “art”. We see here, then, where some critics are willing to call art quite

useless; at the very least, art objects are more valuable in terms of exchange than they are in terms of use value.    The risk then of the market dictating the value and even the meaning of an art work, is that market system art either will not, or cannot o�er the sorts of challenges many feel must be made to the current  capitalist system— with its often inhumane and unsustainable abuses— upon which such work is inextricably dependant.  

The overlap of the art market and community based art   Much of the art work discussed by Heartney in her lecture on art and labour (the second of our two videos for module 3 and 4) is aware of itself as belonging to the market art system and therefore the market economy in general of which it is critical. As such, the work takes up the practices, subjects, and concerns of community based art in order to challenge the market system. Such work walks the line between market system art— given that it shows up in art galleries, is being bought and paid for by art consumers— and community based art— in so much as its practices and themes are in keeping with the latter.