Art as a ‘thing-in-between’: Negotiating boundaries and values in an art circuit event

Abstract

By introducing the analytical concept ‘thing-in-between’, in other words a mediating entity acting from a border position between dual categories, the dynamics and processes of value creation and boundary work in an art circuit event in the south of Sweden is analysed. Drawing on nondualistic notions of the social-material world and more specifically on two paths of the works of Georg Simmel — his sociological theory of value and his concept of the triad as a social form — it is argued that art objects act as the third part in the art circuit experience. As intermediaries with subjective as well as objective qualities, they (re)order boundaries in the cultural/economic nexus of the art-trail: between the commercial and non-commercial; the public and private; between and among consumers and visitors, and between gazing and doing/touching modes of experiencing. Through the boundary work of the art circuit, three types of value emerge: ‘aesthetic consumption’, ‘vicarious life style consumption’, and ‘the value of being together’. It is further argued that these values are more or less socially consolidated, and more or less articulated in different communicative contexts, thus pointing at the situated, performative character of value construction.