No Accountant For Taste
“Cultural value... is multi-dimensional, unstable, contested, lacks a common unit of account, and may contain elements that cannot be easily expressed according to any quantitative or qualitative scale. The characteristics of cultural goods which give rise to their cultural value might include their aesthetic properties, their spiritual significance, their role as purveyors of symbolic meaning, their historic importance, their significance in influencing artistic trends, their authenticity, their integrity, their uniqueness, and so on.”
This installation drew together different strands of my practice; image making, performance, object-based works, and in the closing chapter of the work, the research developed its own rationale and shifted focus to apply this economic model to my own studio output. By exposing these works to market driven thinking—consulting with the Head of Valuations at an auction house; conversing with an economist about cultural value—the project has developed into a wider self-reflexive view of the practice itself in the context of the art market. The catalogue is a trope which underlines the mercantile nature of the art auction; here works are clearly inventoried for the viewer’s convenience and easy reference. The indexical nature of the catalogue disenfranchises specific works from their place within a greater canon. This dismembering action both monumentalises and commodifies the works. The artist shifts position not only as the architect of the work’s marketing index, but as both the executor and chief executive of the amassed cultural material; valuing and appraising my own output is dually legitimises the work while emptying it of its own cultural capital.
My art practice considers the concept of value as according to the current economic paradigm. This project has explored the idea of equivalence at the core of making a transaction, and the qualifying power of market valuation in order to substantiate this economic rationale. The complex, reciprocal relationship between personal taste and actual financial value is a quirk most visible in the art market. The market price of a work is a seal of approval, which both culturally legitimises an artwork and stamps it as a ‘sound investment’. This installation aims to elucidate this relationship, while examining what it means to appraise cultural output through a monetary lens.
Documentation credit Sam Hartnett
Further writing from Emil Dryburgh here.
“… labor, subjectivity, and social life are no longer “outside” capital and antagonistic to it. Rather, they are immediately produced as parts of it. They cannot resist the depredations of capital, because they are themselves already functions of capital.”