TOP: William Powhida, Griftopia, 2011.
Archival inkjet print, 8 x 4 feet.
LEFT: Kyle Fletcher, Fiscal Cliff Notes No. 1, 2013.
Inkjet on newsprint, 18 x 27 inches.
RIGHT: Kate Bingaman-Burt, JoAnn, 2013.
Thermal print, dimensions variable.
commercial signage; reminding us that outside of
the exploding high-end subset of the market so
often fetishized and condemned, the vast majority
of artists and art are part of a bigger stagnating
and shrinking middle market that parallels our
economic times writ large.
The show begins with an opening performance
of social exchange, Safe $ Secure, in which three
ostensible security guards’ scripted vigilance
gradually gives way to improvisation with the
audience. The performance, which acts to embody
and open up questions about the relationships,
particularly involving power and authority, formed
under particular kinds of security economics,
also pokes wryly at one of the most foundational
conceptions in modern economics: that markets
automatically refine human instincts into positive
social relationships. Famously, Adam Smith’s
classic explanation that the butcher, baker, and
candlestick maker work out of self-interest alone,
but in doing so create a better society for all, has
now been taken up by neoclassical economics
as a commonplace argument that the structure
of capitalism as such creates the conditions for
rewarding social ends. Safe $ Secure, in contrast,
questions the sorts of roles we take on in late
capitalism when all relationships are increasingly
mediated by market logics—and the threat of
violence underlying them.
is a multi-faceted investigation of
economic, commercial and aesthetic
value. Featuring artists from across the
country working in a variety of media,
this formal and conceptual cross
section unpacks the ever-changing
relationship between value, wealth,
and worth in contemporary culture.
FEATURING
The current prolific circulation of articles and
mass market books about the increasingly
inaccessible, exorbitant, and often fly-bynight high-end art market seems both deeply
ironic and a perfectly logical entailment about
Americans’ anxieties surrounding value and
worth now. The art world is schizophrenically
both elitist and democratic in its rhetorics:
both a public cultural good and a lucrative
private investment for hyper-rich patrons
whose acquisition styles increasingly recall
Renaissance art economics. The deep
texturing of art as both a commodity and a
symbolically transcendent intellectual object
offers coy oscillations between appeals
to price and pricelessness that offer halfanswers to the serious questions we’re facing
about what value itself is now—a telling
fable about the ever-loosening relationships
between value, price, and meaning.
How to tread the territory of contemporary art
economics without submitting to either gossipy
breathlessness at the scandal of the market’s
informalities or portentous and pretentious
theoretical condemnations about neoliberalism
(one thinks of Dave Hickey’s comment that to call
the market corrupt under our cultural conditions
is like saying that the cancer patient has a
hangnail)? Curator Steve Juras’ answer is twofold:
first, to humor the subject, both through humor
as drollness in style and through humoring as
accommodating and taking up the logics of the
market in the very form of the exhibition. Second,
in critiques regarding the slippage between art
and commodity, rather than focusing on the
common analogies made between the high-end
art market and luxury goods, the artists in Market
Value: Examining Wealth and Worth take as their
points of reference the other end of the commodity
markets: gift shops, design products, and
Kate Bingaman-Burt
Alice Bradshaw
Angela Finney-Hoffman
Kyle Fletcher
Jason Frohlichstein
Mitch Hollingsworth
Mark Merrit
Derek Moore
Steve Moore
William Napperson
Ches Perry
Chad Person
Jason Polan
William Powhida
The contrast between the rent-a-guard trope—a
ubiquitous marker of privatization­—and the
college gallery setting also destabilizes common
understanding of the roles of different institutions
in the market. Kyle Fletcher and Derek Moore’s
creation of Upper Crust Auction House, an auction
website for the show, further calls into question the
relationship between the outward sanctity of the
college from market forces and frames the space
as both a literal and metaphorical marketplace. We
are now used to the auction house supplanting the
curator, the collector as critic, with financial firms
and institutions bypassing the figures that used to
be called on to turn symbolic capital and culture
capital into real capital—particularly the critic.
Within this sea change, where the perceptions and
judgments of critics and gallerists are replaced
by market logics of investment and risk-taking,
the condemnations of financial logics by criticturned-artist William Powhida feel particularly
germane. Powhida’s meticulous infographic
tracing the culpable parties in the 2008 financial
crisis provocatively mirror handwritten essays
that explain in heartbreaking detail step-by-step
directions to manipulating art markets.
Investment as meaning-making is only the strongest
case of another economic motif that underlies the
show: money as a kind of language that speaks
about itself. Two artists use the symbolism of
price and the material of currency themselves as
mediums. Chad Person’s typographic inscriptions
ABOVE: Jason Frohlichstein, The Various, 2013 (publication).
Inkjet on newsprint (edition of 1000), 11 x 14 inches.
LEFT: Chad Person, Fast and Loose, 2011.
U.S. currency on canvas, 16 x 16 inches.
BOTTOM LEFT: Jason Polan, Three Dollar $2 Bill, 2013.
Risograph printed in red, signed in pencil on reverse,
open edition, 8.5 x 5.5 inches.
in which symbolic value surpasses the literal worth
of the art object through information asymmetry and
perceived scarcity, points out that this tendency is
endemic to markets at large.
Continuing the theme of the artist as a value-adder,
we might think of Isabelle Graw’s insights into the
artist’s personhood as a product, and the artist as
a kind of exceptional being whose autobiography
is the source of worth in the work. Kate BingamanBurt’s hand-drawn receipts provide a counterpoint
to this idea, where the autobiography of the artist
provides a conduit between personal value and
commerce. Angela Finney-Hoffman’s work explores
a parallel conception of value-adding by the artist
with VS., a found ping-pong table that the artist,
a professional interior designer, altered so that
plywood covers one half, in contrast to elegant
embroidered canvas on the opposite surface. That
the game is still fully functional attests to the fluidity
of the back-and-forth exchange between worth and
value in art market rhetoric.
on canvas express clichés—know when to fold em,
fast and loose—with lettering that consists of minute
fragments of currency. Person subtly undermines
the economic notion that substantive information
is embedded in prices; we might think of Hayek’s
argument that the real meaning of price is just
shorthand for relationships, a “mechanism for
communicating information” that coordinates “the
separate actions of different people.” Jason Polan’s
stack of $2 bill prints also point to the fictions
created through pricing money; the bill, which is in
fact not out of circulation, is not worth more than its
face value, despite myths to the contrary. Polan’s
playful critique of “value adding” in the art market,
The heart of the exhibition lies in the tension
Finney-Hoffman embodies as an artist who also
works in fields seen as more commoditized: interior
decoration in her case. For artist and designer Jason
Frohlichstein, the focus of critique is design as an
ephemeral product, quickly consumed and often
never distributed. His installation consisting of stacks
of newspapers distributed for free offers a substantive
for those who experience it as an intellectual
object, and a profane material good that can be
sold, marketed, and collected. As simple as this
duality is, the parallels drawn between art markets
and other markets continue to be striking and
enlightening, both of the way we fetishize both art
and of the role of cultural capital in all markets.
The fear of the commoditization of art, as Pop art,
conceptualism, and photographic documentation
have steadily marched contemporary art away
from exceptionality and into a world of substitutes
and what a Thomas Crow editorial from April
2008’s Artforum, just before the financial collapse,
calls “principle of equivalence.”
institutional critique of the consumption of art itself
as a form of mass media. Fletcher continues this
direct confrontation of the consumption of art in
his Fiscal Cliff Notes poster series, which presents a
command to the viewer not to buy the work, both
inviting and then resisting the investment of both our
attention and money into the piece.
Several artists in the show take up this theme, but
rather than referencing the obvious luxury-goods
market, they draw connections between art and
more “lowly” commodities, highlighting the role
of the middle market for art, which is feeling the
effects of the current economy in a disproportional
way to the still-exploding high-end subset of the
market. Steve Moore and professional sign painter
Ches Perry’s collaborative aphorisms combine
Perry’s commercial signage lettering with Moore’s
hollow, ad-speak truisms about value—and, placed
in the front windows of the gallery, both frame the
show and recall mom-and-pop shop storefronts,
yet another victim of the financial crisis. Alice
Bradshaw’s souvenir items—limited edition badges,
bags, puzzles, and cups-- recall gifts shops from
museums and other global tourist attractions.
The images they present are selected archival
images from the artist’s Museum of Contemporary
Rubbish, an online photographic archive of
detritus and discarded material culture. The final
work draws on the running theme of the artist
as injector of aesthetic value and the imminent
collapse between, and endless recycling of, art and
devalued commercial objects.
Art has always been a special kind of commodity,
both sacred in its symbolic aesthetic elements
The public imagination of the relationship between
price and pricelessness in art ultimately allows art
TOP LEFT: Angela Finney-Hoffman, VS., 2013.
Concept sketch for site-specific installation.
TOP RIGHT: Alice Bradshaw, Museum of Contemporary
Rubbish Jigsaw, Item #0451 (takeaway box, UK). Card backed
lustre print, 12 x 8 inches.
ABOVE: Steve Moore & Ches Perry, Value the Worthless on
Purpose, 2013. Sign paint on butcher paper, 24 x 36 inches.
to be a proxy for value itself. As Rachel Cohen
points out, “we have long entrusted the task of
representing our ideas of value to members of
two professions that might seem to have little in
common: banking and art.” The wild speculation,
idiosyncratic regulation, and lack of transparency
that marks both the current financial ecosystem
and art markets betrays the myths and fallacies
of openness and structural fairness involved
in both: there is nothing “free” about the free
markets we now inhabit. The slipperiness of
wealth and worth is only more obvious in the
semi-autonomous role of contemporary art in
global markets, in its unique position in the
global economy. The game of coming together
to come up with prices is only more obviously
informal in the art market. Other places for
assigning value and price are just as arbitrary,
with people coming together and deciding what
something is worth, oftentimes with disregard
to actual cost; we might think of externalities
involved in environmental damage, for example
factory farming and the real cost of a $.99
hamburger. Market Value: Examining Wealth and
Worth offers only one of endless inlets into a
critique of contemporary economics, where the
deepest problem is the faith we put in prices of
any kind as a way of valuing the world, and where
there is serious work to be done in making the
idea of value and money congruent at a moment
in which they are strikingly unaligned.
Monica Westin is a PhD student and University
Fellow, focusing on rhetorical theory and
its intersections with historical debates in
philosophical aesthetics and critical digital
theory, at the University of Illinois in Chicago’s
English Studies department. She teaches in the
Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse Department
and the New Media Studies graduate program at
DePaul University. Her criticism and journalism
has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Believer,
BOMBblog, and Art21, among other places.
A+D
ar t
+
design
AVERILL AND BERNARD LEVITON
GALLERY HOURS
A+D GALLERY
TUESDAY – SATURDAY
619 SOUTH WABASH AVENUE
11AM – 5PM
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 60605
312 369 8687
THURSDAY
COLUM.EDU/ADGALLERY
11AM – 8PM
This exhibition is sponsored by the Art + Design
Department at Columbia College Chicago and Anchor
Graphics. This exhibition is partially supported by an
Illinois Arts Council Grant, a state agency.
ABOVE: Mark Merrit, Mitch Hollingsworth, and
William Napperson, Safe $ Secure, 2013. Performance.
Photography by Joshua Longbrake