The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

39sacred reasonsThe sacred and the profane are woven together. Take, for example, the characteristictranscendent commodity of modernism, the sacred work of highart. Olav Velthuis, a young Dutch scholar and journalist who worked withArjo Klamer of Erasmus University, has studied the pricing in first-timesales of high-art paintings in New York and Amsterdam, interviewing hundredsof dealers. Among art dealers and among the economists watching theart dealers, Velthuis notes, prudence has a rhetoric. The economist-observerwould wish to find that the pricing of art is profane, a matter of wealth maximization.Yet the dealer-participant wants to play both roles, both sacredand profane. He or she wants to be the pater/materfamilias in a sacred imitationof the family and the smart cookie in a profane imitation of the stockexchange. P and S, both, rule.How dealers in the first-time purchase and sale of art negotiate such a contradictionwith their talk is crucial: “The highly ritualized way in whichcontemporary art is marketed is not just a matter of cultural camouflage but isthe heart of what the art market is about. Therefore it makes sense to studyhow dealers talk when they do business.” 1 Indeed it does. Economists and somesociologists want to stick with an eighth-floor view. Velthuis wants to get downalso into the rhetoric of the life world, “to supplement Bourdieu’s structuralreading of the market for symbolic goods with a symbolic reading.” It doesseem natural to read symbols symbolically. Late Pollocks, and the market talkabout late Pollocks, anything to do with Pollocks, are certainly symbolic.But the economist wants to read all prices as prudence, and the anthropologistwants to leave that to the economist. The anthropologist want to