Diedrich Diederichsen
from On (Surplus) Value In Art
Just what is surplus value or Mehrwertwhen we talk about art and culture? Changing material conditions, market' dynamics and cultural ideals are reshaping how this question may be answered today. Drawing on fresh readings of Marxist and postmodern thought, renowned German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen considers the current "crisis of valuation in the arts."
Published in English with the German original and a translation into the Dutch.
ON [SURPLUS] VALUE INART ISBN DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN l f I fTIO ~ 01 9 781
ON (SURPLUS) VALUE IN ART DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN REFLECTIONS 01
I
Existence, Extra Nice
"Where is the Mehrwert?" - in English: the "payoff" - asks the p 'rson on the street. lWhat he has in mind is not Karl Marx's 'on ept of " surplus value" (which is how Mehrwert is directly 1!'L1n lated from the German), but an extra value, an added Ill' additional value, or a bonus, to use a word that means the ltlne thing in most languages. If in everyday parlance, Mehr- '" /'( is an additional value that can be realized in return for a p 'cial effort or in connection with an exceptional situation, IIlI' Marx, by contrast, Mehrwert is the daily bread and butter Ill' the capitalist economy. That economy must constantly 'nerate Mehrwert. The tendency to increase is a natural attril ute of value. Indeed, it is based on the exploitation of labor power, and the fact that it appears to come about naturally is I I'e i ely its greatest trick. A bonus, by contrast, is accorded I h ' status of an exception. And it is precisely such a "bonus" Illtll is being demanded when people ask where the Mehrwert , l:specially when they are speaking of "artistic Mehrwert", which will be the focus of this essay.
Artistic Mehrwert tends to come up when there is a deli' , to justify a special effort made or expense incurred by an 11 1'1 ist, or in the course of the production of an artwork. Or when I iN a matter of weighing whether or not a certain subject or " I proach lends itself to artistic treatment: is there an added vullll: involved in treating it artistically, or would it be better I'rved by a journalistic report? This expression is not just used hV 'ritical or skeptical recipients and consumers. It is also qui lc common in the discussions of panels and juries whose lib it is to evaluate artistic projects, whether these be for art 'hools, funding bodies or professional prizes. For the most II 11' 1, however, the issue of artistic Mehrwert is raised when Ilbjccts are watching over their outflows and inflows of attenlilll1 , and wondering whether or not it is worth their trouble III undertake a process of reception that is time-consuming or hllu nd up with other inconveniences. One tends to hear that I ruould be worth the trouble, provided there is an artistic Mehr-
1 Translators' Note, The authors argument makes use of the fact that, in German, the word Mehrwerf means two different things, depending on whether it is being used in everyday conversation or as a technical term of Marxist economics,ln everyday conversation' it is more or less equivalent to the English ' payoff" or the more recent and
business -oriented ' value-added", ln Marxi ,I economics. it is the original German term for ' surplus value', There is no single Engli ,I, word that captures both of these meaning', I have therefore chosen to leave it in rm~" while glossing its various occurrences just enough to permit the reader to follow til argument.
wert, or payoff. Thus, when art and its enjoyment are at issue, artistic Mehrwert is not just a bonus in the sense of "What extra do I get?", but a conditio sine qua non. In this view, art is a phenomenon that plays out entirely - from beginning to end - in the "bonus realm" and hence must always generate Mehrwert, just like capitalism and capitalists.
Yet the world of art production concerns a particular kind of Mehrwert. Both the capitalist and the artistic variety help to maintain a process that, like breathing and circulation, must continue uninterrupted in order for the organism to survive and they therefore feel equally natural. But under Marx's conception of capitalism, Mehrwert, as "surplus value", is also subject to the law of value in general, which determines all activity under capitalist conditions and both rationalizes and occults the phenomenon of exchange between human beings. "Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic." 2
By "hieroglyphic", Marx means not simply a sign but above all a sign that is not immediately decipherable. Value is determined by the average amount of labor that is socially necessary to produce a given product; it is informed by the countless acts of individual (living) labor performed by individual workers. Thus doubly transformed - first, abstracted from individual labor into social labor, and second, concretized as the particular commodity or product - this hieroglyphic speaks of something, but it is impossible to tell by looking at it what it is speaking of.
If we nonetheless feel that it makes sense to function under this general law, which seems both natural and puzzling, and to participate in the process of increasing value, that is because there are religions, world views, and ideologies, that continue to offer apparently sensible explanations for life under the law of value. In the case of art, however, the legendary artistic Mehrwert, is not - or at least does not seem to be created under the sway of any globally dominant law. Instead,
2 Karl Marx, Capital, A Critique of Political worth, Middlesex, England, Penguin Books, Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes [Hammonds- 1986 [1976[1. U 67.
il refers to the temporary or exceptional suspension oflaws. This suspension is connected, first of all, with the exceptional HIlltus of art in bourgeois society: its autonomy. Secondly, b cause art is regarded as an ally of desire, it is accepted as onc of those forces that refuse to fall in line with the imposed, 'ocrced consistency of life. Thirdly, it is also demanded of III'l that it, unlike the rest oflife, be particularly full of mean-Ing. True, it is supposed to be as bewildering and chaotic as iiI" and the world themselves, with their landscapes and vicisj udes, but ultimately it deals with the fact that - and the wny that - all this is intended. Art clings to society or life or othcr systems suspected of being meaningless and contingent, tnd then in the end, it suddenly comes up with an originator wh is responsible for the whole mess. That is sufficient consollIlion for even the harshest poetry of hopelessness and negaton: the fact that there is someone who wrote it down.
T here are other justifications for artistic Mehrwert, but [II 'rc is no need to elaborate them here. Autonomy, desire lind authorship - these are not only the most common and IHost symptomatic; they also reveal the important feature i hUl all three have in common with those not mentioned: they 'orrcspond, as legitimating discourses, to the great rationales 1111' ort's exceptionalism. Thus, the colloquial use of the word "[('hrwert that I cited at the beginning of this essay refers to I h ' fac t that art is "good for something" and therefore has a Ii ' : it is legitimate and must exist, despite the fact that its III 'oning lies precisely in not being useful. The fact that the word Mehrwert is used to describe this is not as idiotically Iltililarian and intrumentalistic as it might seem. Already in MlIrx, M ehrwert is a figure of meaninglessness. It keeps Ill11cthing going whqse constituent parts (labor, the produc-I on and distribution of products, exchange) would already be jll tificd in themselves (and only in and of themselves) and I II r'~ re have no need for further legitimation or additional ( 1lllSliwent parts. Mehrwert is meaningless and can only be I , itimated by pointing to the fact that without it, the entire 'l1pitalist machine would grind to a halt. While art is not mean-1\ 1 'ss but much too meaningful (since it is always associated
with intent), it too requires additional explanations. To describe a lack, say, not by describing what is lacking but by describing an analogous lack, definitely corresponds to a certain rhetorical figure, but at the moment its name escapes me.
Imagine a situation in which someone is telling a joke that makes fun of people with a certain kind of disability. The disability in question prevents one from articulating properly; it causes one to lisp. The punch line must be delivered by simulating the speech impediment, with a frustrated: "You think that-th funny?" In this case, however, the person who is telling the joke at a party notices that an acquaintance with a lisp has entered the kitchen where everyone stands listening. He frantically tries to come up with an alternative punch line, another way to end the joke, and keeps inventing new strands of the basic storyline to gain time. As he does so, the joke becomes increasingly dull and incoherent, and he loses more and more of his audience, until finally the acquaintance who lisps becomes exasperated and shouts out from the audience, "You think that-th funny?"This story mirrors the trivial interplay between art's legitimating discourses - evoking the theoretical effort that is expended on their behalf - and an audience that, simply (and stupidly), asks what makes something art, asks what its "punch line" is.
The fact that the public identifies'1egitimacy with punch lines and proudly and pretentiously demands them as Mehrwert is something it has learned. Cultural policymakers, whose job it is to make what is not useful useful (which is currently all the rage and takes no great effort), are by definition unable to think any differently. A coalition of the vulgar avantgarde, museum educators and witty artists has brought into the world the idea (which is not entirely new) that, since Duchamp, the goal of art has been to deliver a punch line, that one crucial maneuver, that little extra inspiration. This "extra inspiration" is made up of a number of different elements. First, it involves the communicative strategies of advertising, for which it is important that a brand, a product, and a campaign be organized around a single, identifiable, but surprising "claim," as it is termed in the industry. It also involves the conceit - itself
II result of modern art's need for legitimation - that every work Illust create its own justification, indeed that it must at one 111 1 the same time be both a genre and the single existing in-Illnce of that genre. This requirement is a product of the anti- 'onventional postulates of the avantgarde and neo-avantgarde, II I d in a sense it is perfectly compatible with the extra inspiraton, the claim, and the "show-stopper", since it avoids and is illl 'nt on avoiding anything that is dictated in advance.
Advertising seeks to eliminate all pre-existing assumptions Il'om the act of communication. It does so in the interest of I 0 hing as many consumers as possible. For entirely different I'080ns, the art world sustains a coalition between, on the one hnnd, a justified avantgardistic attack on conventions and on all I III s deriving from materials or from craft and its traditions In I, on the other hand, the interest of certain collectors and institutions in the ahsence of prior assumptions and precondili ns. These collectors and institutions are able to use an art Ihus purged of history as an ideal object for reinvestment, be il lhrough cultural-political instrumentalization or through llilancial speculation. The relativization (to the point of insigni-II 'ui1ce) of the material art object has been conceived and poslulu ted either politically (as a critique of institutions, a critique or lhe material conditions of art as a social institution) or in I . rms of the philosophy of art (positing the visual arts as the III 'lo-art of all the arts, art as a language game, the logic of (ll'Opositions) . It now converges at the level of social symptoms (dis ourse types, attitudes, and fashions) with its intellectualhiHlorical opposite: art's leveling out by speculators' and govern-III 'nts' interest in communication and theme park entertainment.
T he common denominator in this ugly synthesis is the d 'mand for punch lines and Mehrwert. And it is interesting to IIOle that this demand finds a counterpart in the psychological III i lude of certain artists. Their attitude has sought to counter I his synthesis, and its taste for punch lines, in an individualistic {lild voluntaristic way. I have in mine! the tendency of artists " different as Salvador Dati and Martin Kippenberger - both of whom, however, were anything but wholly incompatible with I II· ulture of punch lines, in their tendency to drag out and de':
lay or refuse to deliver them. In Dali's case, there is the of tenrepeated legend - which he himself was fond of embellishingof how he loved to drag out and delay his physical pleasure. As a child, he found special gratification in dragging out the act of crapping to interminable lengths, while as a teenager he liked to have elaborate efforts made to delay his own orgasm. He had already recognized that his audience was primarily concerned with the product rather than the process, and not even the entire product but just the tiny remainder that makes it complete. That extra part ultimately makes up and justifies the entire exceptionalistic, signification-interrupting enterprise of art. For him, of course, the process - his life as an artist - was far more important than the product.
Martin Kippenberger, who was a legendary joke teller and party entertainer, also focused on the various ways of dragging out and delaying punch lines. He told endless, repetitive jokes, but he never let the listener forget that something was coming. All the same, that "something" either never came or did so in a purposely unsatisfying way. Kippenberger's speeches, which were invariably introduced with the words, "I am not one for fine speeches .. . ," have numerous counterparts in his practical work. Uniike pure seriality, which still draws its power from the fact that it exhibits the principle of its production, Kippenberger preferred to work with narrative structures that are emphatically organized around the prospect of a culminating punch line or breakthrough that were nevertheless always withheld. Perhaps the best example of this principle is a work based on Matt Groening's comic figures Akbar and Jeff. All of the strips in this series (which is widely carried by American city listings magazines and media program guides) contain twenty-four or thirty-two panels, all of which are identical except for the last one; the story is told entirely through the dialogue. It is only in the final image that there is a visible change. Kippenberger appropriated strips from this series and altered them in minor ways, but he always left out the last image, so that the punch line never comes.
'I'll 'se individual and voluntaristic attacks on the problem of the punch line may be ranked somewhere on a scale between honlH'uble and obsessive. They demonstrate how important and atten-Ilv ' artists have been aware of the problem on some level. Of ourse, the countermeasures themselves tend to assume the 'horacter of punch lines. And even in the case of works that I' situated completely outside of this logic, the training ofmulim educators, the testimonies of juries and the briefings one I ·jves on guided tours, all help to perpetuate its mechanism. ,'0 I es the vast oral culture of the visual arts: Today, there are v 'r more students, collectors, and other denizens of the art world, and thanks to exhibitions, symposia, openings, and spec-III 'Ies, they have ever more opportunities for conversations IInong larger and larger numbers of participants. The result is I'orresponding increase in the number of art-related stories 1II1d of anecdotes about artworks and their ideas that circulate 11 non-written form. Thanks to the familiar norms of public 'olwersation, these stories also tend to be directed towards punch Iii ·S. Indeed, the author of this essay freely admits that the I ' rror of the anecdotal has helped him a lot when presenting hiN ideas in seminars and lectures at academic art institutions.
To be sure, this culture of artistic punch lines is fueled I olh by enlightenment, reflexivity, dialogicity, and oral culture li N well as by advertising, reductionism, didacticism, and a 'on"lpulsive desire to communicate - and is thus by no means 'I'ur and unambiguous. Yet, this is only one side of the talk Ilbou t M ehrwert, of the slightly sullen demand for artistic *Mehr-*W1'I'f, The discussion remains ambiguous in that it yokes together I wo different things: on the one hand, the conceptual accredi-IlIlion of artistic movements that abstract from concrete objects 1111(.1 introduce the resultirig abstractions into critical projects; III the other, the instrumentalization ofthese abstractions by 1111 ubbreviating culture of communication. It combines the 'XI nnsion of discourse through concept formation and its relIu ,tion through slogans and punch lines into a sometimes III i~tinguishab eprinciple for producing, but above all for re- , 'iving, art: here is the simultaneous success and disaster of I h ' modernist project.
Opposed to the punch line fetishists, there is another coalition that is made up of no less a heterogeneous mix of dubious and to various degrees legitimate arguments and no less a heterogeneous collection of people and positions. This coalition defines artistic Mehrwert as that aspect of art which cannot be captured in words. These are people who already complained that the ideas contained in the paintings of Magritte could be formulated in language. On the one hand, this group sustains the justified call for a complex aesthetic experience that does not simply operate with key ideas and punch lines. But it also sustains a reactionary desire for total immersion and the regressive, pre-reflexive happiness that comes with being completely transported by the aesthetics of overwhelment. Depending on which of these elements we focus on, M ehrwert could either be understood to engage a type of complexity that cannot simply be taken in at a glance, the sense that there is more to be known, ultimately an inquisitive sense that something is lacking. Or else it could express the demand for an entirely "other world", a dreamlike quality undisturbed by discourse or reflection, such as has recently been offered by various forms of immersive art, as w~ll as by the boosters of melancholy and cutification.
All sides of the coalition have a clear artistic criterion, which they call Mehrwert, but they each mean something very different by the term. However, they do remain united in a fear that there might be something being withheld from them, something to be known that hasn't yet been said, or that the party - which is also undoubtedly always on their minds might be happening somewhere else.
Now it is certainly the case that a large part of the art industry may be described in this way, especially when the subjects and clients who populate it attempt to reach agreement about criteria, on the basis of which they are willing to expend their precious attention. Nevertheless, there are large portions of the inner circles (of the art world in particular) to whom this description does not apply. First of all, there are the people who live and work in art's inner spheres, who have always known their profession exactly, and who have no need
oj' Rpccial criteria to reach agreement about their roles. Indeed, p!'of<'ssionals are people who experience their work as a speill ily delimited territory in which everything goes without say-II and nothing needs to be justified. Secondly, these insiders II ul with works, which they are able to recognize, without any I • inl reflection, as belonging to their known working terrilory. A highly specific relationship may be said to exist between 1110 c works that are seen to require artistic legitimation - 11111 h lines and M ehrwert - and those that are acknowledged II un in the everyday sense of the term, without further dis-I II Hi n . The latter are more numerous. Of course, all of I II • works ofthis type - the ones that require no justification - II ' tlctually indirectly justified by other works. T hey are, as it ''', instances of a-legitimation that has congealed and become IIllobtrusive. They are able to forgo external justifications III I thus give off the heavy scent of immanence, in which the hll ine s of art is so fond of steeping. It is works of this kind !lHIt finance the everyday operations of the art industry. They i , 'ulate throughout the world, and images of them fill the IIlll logues and art magazines. Yet it is only works of the first I VP , those that are openly in need of legitimation - that I " J) the discourse alive.
T he system that balances the various types of consumers 1111I onsumer demands for Mehrwert, must further distinguish I1 ll1ong the various interests that work together to stabilize the 1111 Hystem. This becomes especially necessary when great eco-1Illlllic successes make it seem as if there were no need to do so. • ' \I ' 'css is often enjoyed by those things that do not require NP , 'inl legitimation - things that stand on the shoulders of count-II 'a rlier, now obsolete legitimating discourses and on the Ili lting deposits of "discursive substrates", accruing like chalk 111 1 limestone. For example, German painting, which has en-IIV'd international success in recent years, has nothing what-Mil v 'r to do with the contemporary debates, nor with the plill 'h lines to which those debates are often reduced. Instead, I products rest upon a tiered megalith, whose foundation is Mllx Ernst, with magical realism above him, topped by a bit of t, 'rman neo-expressionism, wilde Malerei (Wild Painting),
hippie surrealism, GDR art, and finally the professional veneer of contemporary "finish."These are works that do not have to justify themselves by means of an idea or a surplus of immersion or intoxication. They are merely instances of a type of production that is generally and quite unspecifically recognizable as art. And despite everything that might be said against the art that must be justified and the mechanism by which it operates (or is forced to operate), the type of art beyond legitimation is, of course, something a great deal more boring. And much worse.
In sum, the type of art that generates speculative profits seems to rest on the shoulders of the type that was required to justify itself in cycles of artistic Mehrwert formation, and is now able to make itself comfortable within a deeply felt, even naturalized sense of legitimacy that has long since become trivial and false. Meanwhile, the art in need of justification and its justifying discourses supply the grist for the art world's mill, its conversation and its ideas. But beneath this lies the plump flesh of the art economy - the very old as new. In other words, it is not the case, as is often claimed, that artworks and artistic practices are forced to present themselves as new in order to be successful, or that practices of novelty formation are suspect because they are misused for the. purpose of advancing careers and creating distinction in the market place. On the contrary, this kind of novelty only succeeds in launching discourses. And these in turn, procure certain advantages for those who launch them, but such advantages cannot be compared to the actual material flesh on the bones of artistic success. In order to form that, one must show up fresh like a debutante with something very familiar, and in that case the measure of one's success is precisely the fact that it generates no discourse, or else reduces existing discourse to silence. Neither Lichtenstein nor Twombly, neither the German nor the American "best sellers" of the moment, sparked much . discourse when they were successful. Kippenberger and Basquiat had to die and literally "keep quiet" before they were able to command the high prices they do today. Thomas Scheibitz and Neo Rauch are swathed in absolute "radio silence" as far
liH ourse is concerned. Nevertheless, the system has to go IHt I I'Oducing its discourses and excitements, its punch lines II"d I 'gitimating ideas, since otherwise the chalk upon whose I I of Rugen today's top sellers are building would run out. I hUH, Mehrwert as a punch line or experiential surplus is also Itt iiI' ctly important for the primary form of the commercial ploitation of art. The question now becomes: what kind of ItHlII lodities are actually produced, and how do they become ·ttlllllble?
II Art as Commodity
What kind of commodity is the "art" commodity, and how is it produced by human labor? Who profits from it and how? And is that profit Mehrwert, or surplus value? I would like to shift from considering the career of certain art as opposed to other art and look instead at the economic and, if you will, "value-theoretical" side of the production of contemporary art - at least the type that is shown in galleries and sold on the market. What does the "daily life" of this artistic production look like when considered in light of the now classical Marxist categories oflabor, value and price? In this chapter, I want to show how the exceptionalist economy of art is based, 'to a certain degree, on a rather regular economy. It is as challenging as it is appropriate to try this by using Marxist categories.
Now, we must distinguish between two different processes: (1) the everyday value of the art commodity and its price and (2) the speculative price and its relationship to value; the latter being what people mostly think of when they speak of the art commodity. Of course, there is a sense in which the two cannot be separated. Everything that has an everyday value as a commodity can theoretically also become an object of speculation. But most of the transactions made with commodities in the realm of the visual arts do not (initially) involve speculation, so that they are more comparable with the regular economy of production and consumption, buying and selling. The two values come into being in different ways. Yet these different ways have a common connection to the issue of reproduction and uniqueness (3).
(1) The value of a product is calculated on the basis of the amount of labor that is socially necessary to produce it. At first glance, it would seem to be completely preposterous to apply this Marxist definition of value to artworks. For not only in the case of modern artworks, but already in the case of classical artworks that were produced for a market, the prices of two artworks on which the same amount of time was spent by those
, ho painted or sculpted them could differ enormously. But I hili is not the point. Price is not value; on the contrary, it lh' false semblance of value. As the realization of value in a IV 'n act of exchange, it expresses the notion that, while the I I'i . , depends on a wide range of different variables, the logic Ihul g verns the relationship between price and value is es- 'I)tinlly sound, so that prices may be deemed reasonable or 1111'usonable.
One might object, however, that it is not just absurd to I I'ivc the price of art objects from the labor that is socially II • 'ssary to produce them; it is equally absurd to derive their /III/lIe in this way. The amounts of individual labor required III I roduce artworks are simply too disparate. But, Marx speaks III nn average value. True, one might respond, but in the case III modern art, this average is based on such divergent individllnl data that they do not pile up in the middle and fall off IlIwurd the edges, as in the case of classical averages, but proba-Illy yield just as many extremes in any direction as they do I lilts in the middle. However, this extreme variation is only lit· 'use when one bases one's average exclusively on current I" i . 'S and the labor time currently necessary for the production III II work. But this is already a flawed approach, not only with I IIHts, but even when considering other types of professions III . dentists or engineers. The more appropriate track would be III IlIke the investment in training and other activities that are 1 II • 'cssary part of becoming an artist into account and in-I hid' them in the calculation of the socially necessary artistic Ilhor as well. Then, many more results would collect in the II tidd Ie, for the hours of socially necessary labor would drasti-IIlly increase. The differences between the prices currently II IIlH paid would no longer seem so preposterous, because the IIV 'mll return on the individual hour of artistic labor would dllli precipitously.
Two quantities are particularly interesting in light of this 1111 • of reasoning: first, the amount of time not spent at art Itool that is a necessary part of becoming an artist, and se-IlIld, the question of how the time that is spent at art school is III III ·ed. This is an area in which there are marked differences
between different cultures, countries, and regions, but also between different types of artists. The first quantity - time not spent at art school- has fallen substantially compared with the amount spent at art school. Fewer and fewer professional artists are "outsiders" who acquire their artistic education through romantic involvement in "life" and then go on to invest that productive power. Generally speaking, the curricula vitae of artists increasingly resemble those of other highly qualified specialized workers. Hence, it is becoming almost impossible to reinforce the exceptional status of the art object - which has often been transfigured but also irrationalized by reference to the exceptional lives of the artists as bohemians, freaks, and other homines sacri - in this way. Further, in terms of the time spent in art school, when considering how the value of artistic products is created, it is normally important to ask who financed the artist's training. In Europe, the answer is still primarily, in full or in part, the state (or, in a populist abbreviation, the taxpayers).
In the United States and other neoliberal areas of the world, financing this general component of labor that is socially necessary for the production of art has become the responsibility of the artists. themselves, who take out loans to pay their way through school and, as it were, invest the income they will only receive later into 'their prior education. In this sense, artists are entrepreneurs who pursue their own material interest and later that of others. The alternate model (traditionally followed in Europe) effectively casts artists as civil servants or government employees and hence, at least indirectly, bound to a conception of the common good. Not only are they trained at state-funded universities, they also later take on government contracts and commissions whether they apply for government programs like Kunst am Bau (Art in Architecture 3), for municipal art projects, or become beneficiaries of a publicly financed, postmodern project culture, or whether they ultimately support themselves by
3 Editor's Note, Kunst am Bau is a federal that a certain percentage of the overall program in Germany Iwith counterparts in funding of certain types of building be other European countries I which stipulates devoted to a visual art component.
I II ill one of the many posts available to artists at state-run III 'ho Is. In this way, certain artists participate to a much I' Ill 'r extent in a politically defined project of socialization ( Ilh bureaucratic interface of state institutions). Elsewhere II I Y I fine themselves more strongly through their participa-I 1111 in the market. Ultimately, both approaches undermine the 1IlIlIln.tic exceptionalism of art as well as, in a certain sense, I fill of the commodities they produce.
It is interesting to note that a model of political and pili II ' involvement once existed in the United States, namely III I h 1930s, when visual artists were widely included in NI w cal projects. From Philip Guston to Jackson Pollock, "I Illy artists of the New York school, who would later help III llblish the United States' claim to leadership as a cultural I III P wer of the "free world" as well as New York's global It lid rship of the art market, spent portions of their education \I Id 'uriy careers working on quasi-socialist projects of the ~W1 cal administration. And, having once invested their labor III pi om ting the interests of the state, it was only natural that II I Y lih uld do so again later on, in a completely different set 1. 1 pillilical circumstances. The interests they helped to ad- '1111 ' , became those of the anticommunist, Cold War United 111 1 'N. T he state form remained constant, although its con-I III lind institutions underwent a drastic change. These artists II ,I nOl advance the national interest out of gratitude, but I " Iuse they were already used to working within a framework 11 11 11 was not primarily market-oriented. In a dialectical twist, II WIIH precisely when they became more individualistic that III -/t' w rk became especially useful to the state (with the Cold III' underway and the Republicans in power, the state and til market no longer stood in each other's way).
Now, if we view artists as entrepreneurs who are acting III I" 'ir wn material interest, then the knowledge they have I II ' I in bars and at art school would be their constant capital "It! I h 'ir seasonal production in any given year would be lit II' Vl.lriable capital. They create Mehrwert to the extent that, 'II' employed cultural workers, they are able to take unpaid 11'11 I ime and often informal extra knowledge away from other daily activities – some of which are economic and essential for survival – and invest them in the conception, development, and production of artworks. The more of this extra time is invested the better, following the rule that living labor as variable capital generates the surplus value, not the constant capital. The more they develop a type of artwork that calls for them to be present as continuously as possible, often in a performative capacity, the larger the amount of Mehrwert they create – even if that Mehrwert cannot always be automatically realized in the form of a corresponding price.
A model like this may elicit the objection that the two kinds of capital involved are merely components of a single person, so that exploiter and exploited are one and the same. In fact this situation defines the limit for the transfer of the Marxist terminology to the production of art, especially in terms of the parallel between the employer's purchase of labor power and the artist's commitment of his own labor time and extra labor time. But whether a season's production comes across as promising or idiotic often depends on the newly acquired, additional intelligence of the project and its producer, and its Mehrwert depends on how large a proportion of living labor was involved
Now it goes without saying that the artist who has distanced his activity from practical studio work as well as from extra work in nightlife and seminars, and who, as a purely conceptual entrepreneur, has a large number of assistants who perform these activities for him, creates an entirely different Mehrwert, one that is not produced through self-exploitation.
Let us imagine, then, that I decide to take my own variable capital, the commodity of artistic labor power that I have acquired from myself and my assistants, and – on the basis of the constant capital of my artistic competence, the "technology" of my artistic command of the material – I invest this in a particular manner. Like any other businessperson, I will try to do so in such a way that the proportion of additional labor power invested by me or by my assistants is as valuable as possible. My goal is to produce a value that not only can be realized in the form of the highest possible price in the everyday world
of relations of exchange with gallery owners, collectors, and museums, but one which also maximizes its rate of new labor and variable capital involved, and above all of additional unpaid Mehrarbeit (or surplus labor) in the Marxist sense. In this respect, the specific expectations that contemporary artists must fulfill if they wish to be successful coincide with Marx's formula for Mehrwert: they are to produce works that are as fresh and new as possible (variable capital including Mehrarbeit [or surplus labor]), but they are to do so on the basis of an already existing reputation and knowledge (constant capital). When the proportion of constant capital becomes too large, my rate of Mehrwert formation begins to fall. This is the case, for example, when too much training time must be accumulated in order to then produce something through living labor (my own or that of my employees). This is the economic disadvantage of the intellectual artist (who labors excessively at school), or the artist who acts from an especially deeply felt sense of his or her own biographical imperatives (who labors excessively at the bar). Indeed, the same model of everyday value formation can easily be applied to the presentday self-employed cultural freelancer who works outside the art industry. However, the rate of Mehrwert formation also falls when the artist in question is dead or when only old works continue to be traded. In that case (but not only in that case, since this is now happening with young living artists as well), the laws of speculation take over.
(2) For this other kind of value – speculative value – comes about through properties of the work that are distinct from the value of labor time and its use. Nonetheless, the prerequisite of speculative valuation is a first or primary value of the artwork, derived from its average socially necessary labor. In other words, there must be an everyday art market wherein such an average rationally determines the prices that are paid for a work – made by an artist who has reached a certain age and has spent specific amounts of time at art school, involved in nightlife and living out a creative, experimental existence. A work by a thirty-five-year-old artist that costs, say, twenty thousand euros,
certainly isn't cheap, but it corresponds to the average amount of labor invested in it, also if you compare it with labor by similarly specialized and educated workers in other fields. That may still be the case, albeit just barely, if the price is five thousand euros per work, and it remains the case up into the high five figures – naturally, factors such as size and the number of works that can be produced with comparable effort and expense are important variables that figure into the price.
Price fluctuations within this range are certainly also due to impact and reception outside the market narrowly defined – as recognition on the part of curators and critics, etc. – but are not yet due to speculation. Also, the commodities produced by artists at this level are not absolute exceptions vis-à-vis other commodities and practices. While it is true that artworks are absolute singularities – and this is the case, as we will see later on, even when they are reproduced and reproducible – they have this status as instances of a certain category of commodities. Artists satisfy the general desire and demand for visual artworks – understood as a demand for singular objects – by producing concrete singularities. Rather than an exception to the commodity market, this singularity is precisely the desired quality of a specific commodity type, its universal attribute.
It is worth noting that price differences between five thousand and one hundred thousand euros do not represent an especially broad range of variation. Such price variations are similar to those among mass-produced motor vehicles at different levels of quality and luxury. The fact that the labor of designers and of PR professionals who have helped to establish the symbolic value of a label (and thus added to its constant capital) plays an increasingly important role in creating the value of luxury consumer goods, and of the ubiquitous brand-name- and label-oriented products, does not mean that these values are suddenly being created by pure spirit as opposed to living labor. Activities, such as those involved in name or brand building, also constitute highly qualified types of labor (and should therefore be likened to the labor of acquiring an education). When we regard the various symbolic
values of these labors as the substrates of social distinctions (whose production is learned and practiced inside and outside cultural educational institutions and which are refined in the appropriate milieus), we can see that in these individual acts and decisions, value-defining and not only price-defining labor has none into producing art and design commodities.
A characteristic feature of the normality of the exceptionaliam that determines the everyday life of art is that it consists entirely of objects that seem to have no everyday use value and therefore consist of nothing but inflated exchange values and oxchange value fetishes. But this is not the case, precisely in art's everyday life. In this arena, fetishistically inflated exchange value has been domesticated as what we might call a "secondorder of use value". It goes without saying that there is a certain use value realized in the various ways of relating to art objects - as with all commodities, that use value is dominated by exchange value. Thus, use value is every bit as present in art objects as it is in all other commodities. It cannot be reduced to a "distinctive value", "status symbol", or "symbolic value", as if there were completely unsymbolic commodities, and above all as if those designations themselves did not refer to an eminently concrete use within the sphere of social action, one that people often make no effort to disguise. One might say that the use value of a certain kind of commodity - which includes art objects - lies in its promise to appear as a pure exchange value, its ability to turn into money. It is just as important, however, that this promise goes unrealized for the time being. In deferral corresponds to the art object's beauty. The beauty of that object lies in the dead labor that it will be capable of performing as an exhibition piece or archival object. It holds out the prospect of an eventual transformation, which - if one diaregards the "prosaic" nature of that transformation - may even seem to be an experience of the sublime.
Now for speculation to be possible, it must be able to go far beyond the everyday value of the object while continuing to engage – and invest – in a discourse on reasonableness similar to that which surrounds the primary – and at least apparently normal – relationship of price and value (and the relation-
ship of labor and value embedded within these). It is necessary that, beyond this normal relationship, the distance between labor and value is enhanced by the element of a wager - and hence of another temporal dimension beyond that of labor time. All speculation, whether in art or anything else, refers to the expected realization of value at some future time - to the realization of living labor that will have "hardened" in the form of value, without the need for any additional living labor. At the same time, this wager not only attempts to call upon expert knowledge concerning a particular future expectation; it also attempts to use that knowledge to influence the future directly. However, it is completely indifferent to how value is actually created. As is well known, one can bet on the realization of value completely independently of whether the products in question are agrarian (pork sides, frozen orange juice) or the weatherbeaten products of some outdated form that mixes crafts and industrial production and is itself based on a highly developed division of labor (old apartment buildings in big cities).
In the visual arts, the rationalizing of speculation is based on the notion that this is in some sense a component of the determination of price, either as a truth (that was previously submerged and is now emerging) or simply as a perpetuation of the mixture of value creation, price formation, and reception (that was supposedly contained in the original determination of the object's price). The price of an ordinary commodity only appears as the false semblance of its value (and hence of the way in which living labor is transformed into value) because prices always appear as the prices of things and bring into the world a notion of reasonableness and unreasonableness that can only apply to things. In art, by contrast, the discourse of reasonableness is constantly searching for arguments that go beyond the objective aspects of price formation (rarity, demand, etc.) and include the artistic quality and the time and money required to accrue these - of the individual work in the justification.
In the process of speculation, this rationalizing discourse becomes doubly false. Not only is it still based on the notion that prices can adequately express value, it now insists that the
speculative price - far from having even less to do with living labor - is a particularly intimate and faithful expression of the frue status and metaphysical value of living artistic labor. The price fetched at auction is meant to be the voice of history, in contrast to the price paid on the everyday art market, which In merely the voice of fashion.4 From the notion of ars longa, which legitimates art by pointing to its longevity and outlasts the vita brevis, to the notion of the never-ending character of aesthetic experience that is posited by modern reception theory, there is a long line of philosophical theories of belated truth, of the gradual revelation of reality, of the slow accomplishment of justice, all three of which are purposely conflated with speculation in the specific mode of false consciousness that characterizes the art market. It is also telling that, in recent decades, advanced art has not only taken duration as the subject of apacial genres (duration pieces); it has also made it the subject of large portions of fine art genres that were originally conceived exclusively in spatial and object-like terms (time-based installations, even time-based paintings).
But this doubly false semblance based on the rationalizatton of speculation, is not to be confused with the act of double negation. It merely completes the illusory character of the first or primary kind of price, making it "airtight" and impenetrable. This illusion is also causally connected with that first or primary price: Every normal, everyday act of purchase and exchange in the world of primary prices and their associatted values can also be read as an act that has a bearing on speculation, even where the prices involved are list prices that are apparently the same for all.
(3) There is a widespread assumption that the commodity character of artworks is associated with their reproducibility. The view that reproduced or reproducible artworks are not really artworks at all but merely commodities is a misunderstanding that it is probably no longer necessary to correct. Of
4 At least this constitutes the elements of the elements to do something else - staging gallery shows as auctions; biennials as gallery shows; coming soon: the auction as debut.
basic market system for art, even when today people sometimes use these classical
course, it was only natural that the first post-ritual artworks that is, secular artworks that were no longer made on commission and were often produced in factory-like studios by teams of workers who divided the labor among them, supervised by the master - could only become commodities by presenting themselves as originals. The aura of the original, which is the prerequisite for the artwork's commodity character, is a mystification in its own right. It functions like the mystification already embodied in the work's commodity character, but it mystifies something else. The commodity form lends to the transformation of living labor into abstract labor, use value into exchange value, an object-quality that causes the social character of the labor and its distinctive features to appear natural. Via the conceptual fetish of the "unique genius of the artist," the aura of the original causes the living artistic labor to appear as a patina, a physical index, an aspect of a work's chemical and material composition, hence as a quality connected with natural material decay, that is, as all of those things that can be fetishized under the headings of personal signature, uniqueness, originality, and artwork. Not all of these concepts, however, refer exclusively to the material quality that causes the living artistic labor to appear as an auratic object. To a certain extent, the authentic material of the original has already evaporated and the art object has turned into something like a metaphysical index.
Since the twentieth century, the artistic commodity is no longer required to be an original in the strict sense. It can take the form of a multiple, a printed work, a rare periodical, or a readymade. The artist's singularity is no longer transferred to the object via physical contact with them, but via a spiritual one. The artist conceives the readymade, plans the project. Nevertheless, the process must ultimately result in rare, singular objects: traces of production, out of print periodicals and printed works, gallery posters, invitations, certificates, or objects auraticized by other kinds of visible or less tangible efforts. What these objects display is no longer a physical index but a metaphysical one. Their reference, however, is neither iconic, nor is it symbolic. The artwork is not an image of the artist's
blangularity, nor is it an arbitrary sign. Rather, it continues to be regarded as an index of his or her uniqueness, his or her alingular individuality. The artwork is an image with respect to the world it represents; that world, however, is secondary to the indexed uniqueness of its deliverer or deliverers (since annetimes the focus is on unique constellations or collectives that then singular artists). It is a symbol within the social relation: in the differential production of its meaning and status in relation to other works. Its value, however, is determined in connection with its aura, and therefore indexically.
In the case of this second, more widespread "metaphysical index", the artistic commodity not only contains the abatraction of the artist's living labor, together with all of the labor previously invested in art school, nightlife, and Bohemian walletence. It also contains the additional, non-artistic living labor of the artist's employees and assistants as well as that of subsidiary firms such as printers, foundries, etc. In addition, however, it further - and above all - contains the spiritual management of all of these subordinate types of labor by a director, a person in charge. This director, then, performs intellecfund labor, and a steadily growing amount of such labor, which cannot be described in detail but which acquires a metaphyalcal index in the mediated presence [Vermittelheit] of the artist's traces, in the mediated presence of the aura and its conversion into an "as-if aura". This is the case even when the work itself takes a critical view of, or attempts to exclude, questions of artistic subjectivity. In the art context, projects, performances or other works that do not yield objects are also auratic, provided they result in some trace that is capable of, at some point, ending up in a private collection and acquiring a value.
This new aura is thus a special kind of value that realizes managerial and intellectual labor as well as the many kinds of labor that go to make up the artist's life. Objects are better able to do this the less they continue to thematize the classical aura, with its material traces of the physicality of the artist.
Nevertheless, in the end, artworks must be capable of absorbing the trace and the quasi-indexical mechanism of this new
aura, which is purely conventional but binding for all involved. These characters might be described as the specific aesthetic qualities of the object. And indeed, the logic of speculation often regards the length of the dead labor - or some other form of increased intensity, usually via exhibition - as heightening the object's auratic value in the same way that the quantity of living labor heightens its simple value. Other forms of this increase in intensity are new facts about the artist, new auction results, etc.
Of course, some may object that the construction of a metaphysical index, an aura of artistic subjectivity working in hierarchical terms, is merely another way of describing an extremely conventional model of intention and execution, or even a way of recasting the notion of expression. In actuality, it is an attempt to demystify popular notions that are related to both of these concepts and that help to establish a willingness to regard an artwork's price as the price of something that cannot actually be evaluated. The reason, then, that this attempt at demystification does not operate with other, perhaps more modern perspectives on artistic production in which there is something like an antecedence of materials, genres, and discourses and in which artists merely inscribe themselves, is that it focuses on precisely those notions of price and value - namely the speculative that predominate in the art industry, rather than other, more academic descriptions that allude to the activities of recipients and producers. In order to do so, it makes use of the Marxist model of opposing living and abstract labor, use value and exchange value, value and price. Artworks and art projects are capable of articulating content and enabling aesthetic experience independently of their commodity form. What is important, however, is that they do this through the auratic object, which has a highly specific connection with the generation of value that differs from that of newspaper journalism and poetry - although the latter also articulate content independently of the way their commodity value is generated. In the case of artworks, the question of value is always (at least partly) thematically embedded as
11111 ' Ill in a specifically concealed manner, since artworks 011I I II 'mselves up as fetishes.
* ription of the commodity character of artworks ription from a particular perspective. It has no I, II -lO replace other perspectives, but seeks to develop a I, • I y picture of value, which it distinguishes from price, I I V IIg it from the artist's living labor. In doing so, it uses an .' It .t! II 'vice - the notion of an everyday aspect of artistic I I plionaiisrn, the notion of a "domesticated" exceptionaliii 'I'his domesticated exceptionalism can only exist and at I I I . 'orne reasonably plausible if it occupies the force 1.1 h lween the c:!veryday life of everyday value creation and II I double exception of speculation. So far, it has been 1111 II lhat speculation has developed an everyday life of its " Wilhin that everyday life, especially in other art forms, 1111 v 'r, an intensification has taken place that forms "II lib;' t of this essay's third chapter, "A Crisis of Value".
III A Crisis of Value
Thanks to the special object character of visual artworks, the relationship between their economic price and the living labor that has gone into producing them and that was previously invested in the artist's education is fundamentally different from that which exists in the other arts: film, music, and theater. Nevertheless, in the bourgeois era a system developed that, in addition to the exceptional returns sometimes enjoyed by living visual artists, also ensured that other artists would be able to make a living. These artists had to sell their labor in the market place in various ways and at various levels of the social hierarchy, and did not as often have the privilege of working as independent artists and entrepreneurs. In return, however, the system guaranteed them economic security. That system was based in part on the reproduction of their work and in part on their physical presence at performances. Because of the high labor costs involved, this live performancebased segment (theater, opera, symphony) is still associated with heavier financial losses. It therefore tends to be most robustly funded by the state or - in the United States, for example supported by private, not for profit institutions that receive tax breaks in place of government funding. The reproductionbased segment - film and music - does make profits, which in the classical era of the culture industry were produced by employing industrial means of production and exploiting living artistic and other labor. In Western capitalist societies, profits generally tend to be private, while losses are more often than not assumed by the state. But the reason why the surplus value gained from reproduced cultural commodities was so high is that the latter contained a large amount of cheap living labor performed outside the artistic sector. That labor extended from literal reproduction - in record pressing plants and film duplication facilities - to packaging and printing, from shipping and freight to advertising and promotion. Digital reproduction has put an end to the possibility of creating Mehrwert by exploiting large quantities of poorly paid, untrained
labor directly involved in the physical production and distribution of the reproduced cultural commodities.
Now, however, the culture industry has entered a crisis. As reproduction continues to become massively cheaper and easier (affecting the film and music industries to differing alogrees), Mehrwert formation has been forced to shift to the other sectors of production. In this reproduction-based sector, It was not enough to drive wages - or the prices paid for living artistic labor - into free fall to keep the rate of profit high (the rate of profit depends on having the largest possible proportion of living labor). Only a tiny handful of superstars, or classical musicians directly employed or subsidized by the govarment, are still able to make a living from their music alone. In the realm of cinema, experimental and artistic films have shrunk to a handful of government-subsidized works on the fringes of television. Thus, in the music- and film-based segments of the culture industry, the emphasis has shifted from an object-based economic form to a performance-based one, in which living actors are regarded less as a long-term investment whose status is comparable to that of the self-employed businesspeople in the world of the visual arts; instead, they tend in have the status of day laborers. The only route out of this way of life is toward the government-subsidized high art segments (theater, ballet) or the visual arts.
Meanwhile, the exodus to the auratic-object- and performance-based realms is continuing. Musicians can only hipport themselves by touring and taking advertising contracts, not from the sale of reproduced sound storage media, whose reproduction has become obsolete in the digital age because\nexplicit and originals have now become technically indistinguishable. Hence, experimental filmmakers and musicians are\nincreasingly attempting to define their works as originals or as objects that are no longer originals in a technical sense, but mather carriers of a secondary aura or metaphysical index. Moreover, the culture industry is experiencing the proliferation of a wide variety of new "discount sectors" (in television, the Internet, and the CD and DVD markets). Here, performancebased formats have emerged that involve a deprofessionalized
and deregulated culture-industriai proletariat - one that helps to produce liveliness, animation, masturbation material, emotion, energy, and other varieties of pure life and sells its own self-representing labor power very cheaply, no longer as labor power but as less and less professional "life force" or vitality. Porn becomes the increasingly apt economic model. At the same time, clients and producers at the upper end of the bygone culture-industrial sector are fleeing to the objectbased arts.
Possession of the secondary aura ultimately allows the visual arts to follow suit via the selling of alien products products that were not originally art objects but were sold through reproduction and are now ennobled by the metaphysical index. These include records made of crazy colorful vinyl and produced in limited editions, CD boxes with high design value, and multiples of all kinds. However, unlike the multiples that come from sculpture, these tend to function as artist books used to, as ennobled but essentially conventional data storage media (sound and image carriers or books).
The flight towards auratic object production, on the one hand, and the proletarianization of performance, on the other, effectively usher in a situation that blends the features of precapitalist and post-bourgeois conditions. Previously, the bourgeoisie was a stable, cultural class that had its place at the center of cultural production, which it regulated by means of a mixture of free-market attitudes and subsidies, staging its own expression as both a ruling class and a life force that stood in need of legitimation. The bourgeoisie is now fragmenting into various anonymous economic profiteers who no longer constitute a single, cultural entity. For most economic processes, state and national cultural formations are no longer as crucial for the realization of economic interests as they were previously. As a result, the bourgeoisie, as a class that once fused political, economic, and cultural power, is becoming less visible. Instead, the most basic economic factors are becoming autonomous. Once these factors become autonomous, the obligation towards cultural values that even the worst forms of the culture industry kept as standards, disapI" II ,' I'hi tendency contributes to the emergence of two dif-I I III 'ultural worlds. One rewards purely physical talent, llillity, agility, and other performative, ephemeral, erotic, and 'III 1M 'lie attractions. In this world, the subjectivity of the per-I,,, 111 ' 1'8 will ultimately be reduced to an essentially interchange-Ihll p 'rformance quality- a development that is to some , 11111 tilready underway with the proliferation of DIs, rock It old, amateur actors, and reality show casts and extras. The 1'11111 'Iy available work - a stable object that could be found II II I'hives and on backlists and that once made it possible to 1111 lish public personalities throughout entertainment cul-IIIII is disappearing, while the number of stars is decreasing, I ilil ' 'd by an ephemeral and shifting population of semi-I I Iwit ies. Thus, the whole thing is gradually coming to re-I II II I ' a world of traveling minstrels and itinerant theater III It III 'S [rom pre-bourgeois, pre-capitalist culture, albeit now 1111 lilt ing under the conditions of the digital age.
In the other cultural world, auratic objects will continue '" h introduced into circulation. In part, they will function I n of the metaphysical index - a trace of the artist's indivi- "Illily, of an attractive social sphere, or of technological adill 'ment and the ontology of the fashionable - and in part III V I h 'mselves will have become a kind of common coin or II 1111 ·nder. They will be associated even more forcibly with 1111 I 'lIsingly mythified artist subjects and their world. Since Iii I " ntral function is to bring primary and secondary value, til I 'Iutcd value creation environments, discursive and silent 011101 her dead labor together with living labor, new formats III II rise that will have to reflect and ideologically confirm this IlIlIdnnce of meaning and to some extent also power.
The internally heterogeneous post-bourgeoisie, which 1111i ts of profiteers of the current world order who come 11 111 11II trcmendous variety of cultural backgrounds, seems to II I ' h 'cn able to agree on the visual arts as a common ground. 1111111 this consensus, the post-bourgeoisie will create a myth ,I III' Ilrtist that is different from the myth created and believed II !IV I hc old bourgeoisie. Like the old myth, this new one II II , based on an ideal self-image: an excessive, hedonistic, and powerful monster who shares the old artist's enthusiasm for acts of liberation but is far removed from all political or critical commitments. Like the new performance proletarians, it will embrace restlessness and instability as a cultural value and idealize precariousness. The boundary between performance proletarians and neocharismatic artist monsters will be regarded as fluid, and now and again someone will write a heartbreaking musical about the supposed permeability of that
boundary. As a last remaining consolation, let us be glad that, here in Chapter III, I am writing in a literary tradition. Talking about a crisis is after all a classic literary genre. It usually leads to a transformation of tendencies into totalities. But tendency and totalization obey different developmental laws.
Translated from the German by James Gussen