Abstract
A large segment of contemporary art today is dependent on branding, publicity and marketing. The art market has turned art into something that can be measured – like money and it would indeed appear that money has now become more important than art. The text takes as its point of departure a film by the Belgian artists group Potential Estate The Crying of Potential Estate (2008). The film functions as a multi-faceted critique on the mechanisms of the commercial art world, and subverts the fundamental principles of the art market and its dependence on the financial exchange of a tangible ‘object’. The text elaborates on the symbolic violence that the market and capitalism exercise on art taking the film as a case study but also examining other art world structures and institutions. The author argues that the question is not how to eliminate money from the equation, but how the conditions for art production can be less dependent on the art market. She suggests that artists should reclaim the power they have relinquished to collectors, galleries, museums and curators and that art’s capacity for ‘imaginative truth’ should be wrested back from commercial vested interests and those who have reduced it to a marketable commodity.
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Notes
- 1.
Kuspit (2007).The text is derived from a talk titled “Art Values or Money values: An Analysis of Art Prices in 2006,” given at the New York Studio School on Feb. 22, 2007, www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit3-6-07.asp.
- 2.
Potential Estate/Cabinet Anciaux is David Evrard, Ronny Heiremans, Pierre Huyghebaert, Vincent Meessen, Katleen Vermeir
The Crying of Potential Estate includes the artistic collaboration of Adam Leech, Mon Bernaets, Amir Borenstein, Eric Thielemans, Jean-Yves Evrard, John Pirard & Marc Lacroix
- 3.
In The Gift, Mauss argued that gifts are never “free” but rather give rise to a sentiment of obligatory reciprocal exchange. The question that drove his inquiry into the anthropology of the gift was: “What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?” (1990:3). The answer is simple: the gift is a “total prestation”, imbued with “spiritual mechanisms”, engaging the honour of both giver and receiver. Because of this bond between giver and gift, the act of giving creates a social bond with an obligation to reciprocate on part of the recipient.
It is the fact that the identity of the giver is invariably bound up with the object given that causes the gift to have a power which compels the recipient to reciprocate. Because gifts are inalienable they must be returned; the act of giving creates a gift-debt that has to be repaid. Gift exchange therefore leads to a mutual interdependence between giver and receiver. According to Mauss, the “free” gift that is not returned is a contradiction because it cannot create social ties. Following the Durkheimian quest for understanding social cohesion through the concept of solidarity, Mauss’s argument is that solidarity is achieved through the social bonds created by gift exchange Mauss (1990 (1922)).
- 4.
www.potentialestate.org/Newsletter-02-Curare-Curare.html
- 5.
Footnote: Cabinet Anciaux is named after Marie-Adèle Anciaux (1887–1983) also known as Mary Smiles. Anciaux was a libertarian who participated at early pedagogical experiments along with her husband Stephen Mac Say (1883–1972) teacher, beekeeper, stallholder and author. In 1928, Mac Say published From Fourier to Godin the first complete survey on Godin’s Familistère, the only successful and long lasting utopian community based on Fourier’s communalist theories. The Familistère located in Northern France was a philosophical, social and architectural utopia that lasted a century. Fourier’s writings about turning work into play influenced the young Karl Marx, a former Brussels resident. From: www.potentialestate.org
- 6.
Lyotard (2006). The authors go on to suggest that, “For Lyotard, the logic of capital or the ‘genre of the economic’ as he terms it in The Differend is that of gaining time. Following Marx, Lyotard asserts that capital is consistently at war against the lag between idea and production, manufacture and commodity. Capitalists compete on the basis of time, the time it takes to make a commodity, to get it to the market place. Capital is thus at war with the human itself….Lyotard asserts that art is a key weapon in the war against ‘gaining time’. Modern art, in particular is a game of questioning and thus of inducing the pause or lag. Art inserts conversation, play, reflection where capital wishes to eliminate it. Art thus resists capital since as an example of a primarily ‘useless’ kind of activity it queries the logic of gaining time over thought, critique, decision. He does not deny that art itself can be a commodity and thus implicated in the fetish character of modern life. He merely wishes to restore the sense of importance of an avant-garde in art which in turn means non-realist forms of art that resist reproduction as commodity (i.e. installation art)”
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Gregos, K. (2012). Saturn and His Children. The Crying of Potential Estate: A Case Study of the Art Market as Metaphor and Practice. In: Vanderbeeken, R., Le Roy, F., Stalpaert, C., Aerts, D. (eds) Drunk on Capitalism. An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Market Economy, Art and Science. Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Science, Nature, Art, Human Action and Society, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2082-4_11
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