Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

Given this, shouldn’t we be scrutinizing certain historically unique aspects of our market
relations? How have these wrought fundamental changes in the “art” produced? I know many
of us are grateful beneficiaries of this market. Nonetheless, we have all ended up victims of its
capriciousness, the “principles” of modern art having trapped us in a panoptical prison of our
own making. Simply, this is the realization that if the arts were really democratized, we as
producers of an elite art would no longer have any means of functioning—wanting to abolish
elitism in modern art is tantamount to wanting to abolish modern art itself.
WHILE WE’VE BEEN ADMIRING OUR NAVELS
Within the moneyed structure of modern art, the collector or speculator or investor does not
openly purchase my (as an artist) labor power; both my labor and means of production remain
my own property and I sell only the product of my labor. 2 What this suggests to me is that, in
New York today, I am operating on the principles of a lower or earlier stage of economic
development, an atomistic stage of competitive market capitalism. However, when faced with
the larger marketing structure in which we all live and which is far more highly developed, we
become easy game for exploitation by that market. As we well know, a monopolistic international
market was already operating under full steam by the time conditions arose which
made it possible to incorporate the art-marketing system—hence the transformations involved
were unavoidably more rapid, the changes unavoidably more aggressive and antagonistic to
each of us.
This is just one of the many paradoxical social contradictions I find myself in—that I
am a producer still working under the illusions of one marketing system, while being a consumer
in another, more overwhelming system. To me the most disturbing question is: to what
extent have the modern market relations permeated my atomistic production? That is, what
are the changes this has brought about and what are the consequences in my life? An answer
to this may be pointed to in the actual functioning of a work of art in the market.
From the locus of the market, the work of art represents commodity capital; it acquires
a market price which, being a function of manipulated demand and supply, virtually always
deviates from the price of production—the concept of any sort of an “equilibrium market”
where the market price is equal to the price of production is (almost) unheard of in the art
community (that is, price would equal the sum of the cost of materials and wages for personhours
worked on the merchandise). But why should an equilibrium market be inconceivable
to me? Or—the flip side of that—how is it that the work of art is so readily manipulated in
the market? There are a number of feasible answers, some reflecting attitudes like the romantic
ian burn the art market 321