Author(s): Natasha Degen

ART THEORY

Transnational markets hold sway over all aspects of contemporary culture, and that has transformed the environment of recent art, blurring the previously discrete realms of price and value, capital and creativity. Artists have responded not only critically but imaginatively to the many issues this raises, including the treatment of artworks as analogous to capital goods, the assertion that art's value is best measured by the market, and the notion that art and money share an internal logic. Some artists have investigated the market's pressures on creative democracy, its ubiquity, vulgarity, and fetishizing force, while others have embraced the creative possibilities the market offers. And for a decade curators and theorists have speculated on the implications of this new symbiosis between art and money, cultural and economic value. Drawing on a wide range of interdisciplinary sources, in dialogue with artists' writings, this anthology traces the historic origins of these debates in different versions of modernism and surveys the relationships among art, value, and price; the evolution and influence of patronage; the actors and institutions of the art market; and the diversity of artistic practices that either criticize or embrace the conditions of the contemporary market.

Artists surveyed include Carl Andre, Fareed Armaly and Christian Philipp Muller, Fia Backstrom, Conrad Bakker, John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, Ian Burn, Maurizio Cattelan, Lygia Clark, Elmgreen & Dragset, Andrea Fraser, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Guerrilla Girls, Andreas Gursky, Hans Haacke, Keith Haring, Marianne Heier, Damien Hirst, Christian Jankowski, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Liu Ding, Takashi Murakami, Ahmet O ut, Gabriel Orozco, Danica Phelps, Tino Sehgal, Richard Serra, Nedko Solakov, Reena Spaulings, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Andy Warhol, Fred Wilson, Erwin Wurm, Zhou Tiehai. Writers include Theodor Adorno, Jack Bankowsky, Jean Baudrillard, Luc Boltanski, Pierre Bourdieu, Martin Braathen, Malcolm Bull, Eve Chiapello, Thierry de Duve, Marvin Elkoff, Hal Foster, Peter Fuller, William Grampp, Josh Greenfield, Miwon Kwon, Kate Linker, Scott Rothkopf, Peter Schjeldahl, Thomas Seelig, Marc Shell, Georg Simmel, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Wolfgang Ullrich, Karen van den Berg, Thorstein Veblen, Olav Velthuis, Thomas Zaunschirm