Commodity Fetishism, Legal Fetishism, Converted Forms, and Aesthetic Fetishism

Abstract

In this paper, we analyse two recent contributions to the Marxist critique of the political economy of art: the article “Artistic Labor and the Production of Value: An Attempt at a Marxist Interpretation” by José María Durán and the book Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics by Dave Beech. While Durán emphasizes the emergence of the legal category of intellectual property rights as crucial for value production in art, Beech has reached the contrary conclusion that artistic labour does not produce value and that artistic production is therefore excepted from capitalist commodity production. In our paper, we criticize both conclusions. While agreeing with Beech that artistic labour does not produce value and is thus excepted from the ideology of commodity fetishism, we believe that through the ideology of converted forms it nevertheless becomes part of capitalist commodity production. We would argue that the sector of artistic production, through the converted form of monopoly rent, establishes a production relation with other, competitive, sectors of capitalist economy. This production relation is enabled by the ideology of aesthetic fetishism, supported by the ideology of legal fetishism through the category of intellectual property rights. Contrary to Durán, we thus conclude that intellectual property rights allow for a hidden transfer of surplus value produced by the workers in the competitive sectors of the capitalist economy.