Is the Market Everything?

Graw, Isabelle. High Price : Art between the Market and Celebrity Culture. Berlin ; New York: Sternberg Press, 2009. Print.

At first I found Isabelle Graw’s article deeply alarming. I read her description of artists who attempted to avoid the market as “artists’ artists” as derogatory, and it seemed to me that she was saying that there is no escape from the market. She seemed to be saying that the market was an unavoidable reality by which the worth of any art could be measured, and that if the market didn’t like art, it was worthless. She describes the line between the market and art as becoming highly permeable (Graw)(pg81), and this could be said of every aspect of life under Neoliberalism. Under the regime of Neoliberalism, all of life is subject to market forces, so art is not likely to be an exception.[1]

Within art itself, since Duchamp, life has permeated art theory and production. Many artists make art that has finally no object that can be seen or sold. Often this art is known, only from documentation of its existence. This may be an attempt to avoid the market, although obviously documentation can be sold as a substitute for the art piece, but it may also be for reasons that are outside the market paradigm. In his book, Art Power, Boris Groys describes artists who document art rather than present it. “ For those who devote themselves to the production of art documentation rather than artworks, art is identical to life, because life is essentially a pure activity that has no end result. The presentation of any such end result—in the form of an artwork, say—would imply an understanding of life as a merely functional process whose own duration is negated and extinguished by the creation of the end product—which is equivalent to death.” (pg 54)(Groys)

But I think it was just this kind of “outside market” thinking that Graw was defining. Earlier in the same book she says, “But every net has its holes, holes that can be made wider, which in theory can cause the entire net to rupture. Being constrained by market conditions does not imply that we cannot reject them. On the contrary, this book advocates questioning market values precisely in the light of one’s own involvement. It is possible to reflect on market conditions other than those seemingly imposed by consumer capitalism”. (Graw)(pg7)

Graw, Isabelle. High Price : Art between the Market and Celebrity Culture. Berlin ; New York: Sternberg Press, 2009. Print.

Groys, Boris. Art Power. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008. Print.

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[1] Instead of conceiving of “the market” as evil Other, I work from the premise that we are all, in different ways, bound up in specific market conditions. Consequently the market is not understood as a reality detached from society. Rather, after sociologist Lars Gertenbach, it is conceived of as a net that encloses the entirety of social conditions.