Art: The value of things

Abstract

Wilful blindness of the forces at play in the value of things has accompanied the rise of the marketplace as a universal equivalent, slowly eroding any distinctions between the economic and non-economic. The ideal of the museum, a repository for the exemplary products of the past, gave visible form to the existence of a symbolic economy, a resistant space appearing outside or alongside the exchanges of people and things. Encyclopaedic museums were the central banks of this symbolic economy -- networked out into galleries (commercial and public), dealers, curators, academics and so on -- allowing visitors to experience the social value of the things on display -- to feel the enormous cultural presence of the Elgin Marbles, Benin bronzes or the Rosetta Stone, to be staggered by their beauty -- while rendering invisible the enormous material, political and financial investment required to hold those objects in their place. Similarly, the cultural history of the `idea' of the department store is only slowly coming to light, buried as it is under generations of prejudice and dull economic `analysis'. By becoming so obviously entangled, the structural circuit of the museum and store is over, or at least their influence retains only a pale shadow of its previous force. The speed and stunning profusion of modern material life has deformed the nature of culture. If the traditional differences between things have evaporated, or distinctions in operation lie exposed as arbitrary (a worst-case scenario), or ideological (a best-case scenario), a question remains. Values are no longer implemented from above -- informed solely by the taste of the few -- but ripple and fluctuate through a networked web of different images, objects, spaces and media. On an individual and public, national and international scale, we are described by an astonishing array of things: piling up around us is a growing mountain of clothes, tools, art, gifts, information, souvenirs, knowledge, electronic technology and rubbish. This vast accumulation of objects -- anything from ancient Egyptian sandals to a laptop computer -- exists in a complex mesh of competing narratives, narratives which dispute ownership, contest interpretation, disagree on value, and argue over where things belong. As objects are inserted into, and spill out of, every shell cupboard, display case, shop, home, gallery, museum, magazine, computer monitor and landfill site, there is an endless struggle to control, classify and interpret. Traditionally, the privileged sector of European cultures tended to value the `Fine Arts' -- paintings, sculptures and the bric-a-brac of a former aristocracy (and that of their advisers, dealers, market-makers, and the galleries, private homes, academies and museums through which they circulated) -- as the sole vehicle of taste, education and power. These values privileged history, singularity, authenticity, and academicism: a stable and restricted symbolic economy grounded in the interpretation of old objects removed from the everyday circulation of things. But as the nineteenth century progressed, the power associated with cultural competence -- a sense of participating in the interpretation of the important objects within a culture -- could no longer be confined to this restricted economy of Fine Art and related institutions. Finding themselves adrift in an endless stream of commodities made available by new methods of mass-production, the rapidly emerging urban middle class had the opportunity to set itself apart from the industrialists (who emulated the old aristocracy), and from the more established working class. Through a greater access to material things, those outside the former social elite could now participate in the creation of values of all kinds, by discriminating amongst the new products of industry and commerce. The emergence of the department store and public museum seem to perfectly represent the awesome technologies for the sourcing, transportation, warehousing, accounting, stocking, display and redistribution of material things. …