I think I would divide the singularities into objective/subjective. Objectively singular things would be things that collect all that subjective attention, collective labor, into one thing; so they become something of the apotheosis of reification. While you’re right that each and every desire is incommensurate with each other, as desire, since it is personal, unique, etc, I don’t think this changes the fact that the commodities that satisfy or enable them are not.

I’ll have to check my selected Marcuse and see if any of his aesthetics was included in it.

What our difference of opinion comes down to is the way I’d choose to use “commodity” as a descriptive term (at least, when I first wrote this post; I am wavering now). I would not want to use it to describe valorization of things that do not produce “commodities,” but merely things exchanged under the commodity-form. This is a sort of nitpicky and irrelevant distinction, and would go back to the broad sort of distinction between productive and unproductive labor, trying to divine where the value of things is created, how it is distributed, etc. I am less committed to this now.

You’re right that the singularity is the sticking point in our friendly disagreement. I don’t think this is at all incompatible or even that anomolous as a commodity. Here’s two examples. Say I have a very sick child, some condition which is curable if expensive and prolonged treatment is given, which my insurance doesn’t cover. I want my child cured/healed. I raise a bunch of money to get the treatment. On the one hand, the services purchased are banal, clear as commodities. On the other hand, the use value for me is absolutely singular: saving my child’s life and quality of life. Not a child, not a category, but my child here and now. Second example, purchasing travel to see a loved one. Again, the item purchased on the one hand is absolutely banal as a commodity. On the other hand, it’s totally unique: I have to see grandma this year because she doesn’t have many left, and she will tell me about when grandpa organized a union at the steel plant in Elgin. Again, a singular use value.
Now, obviously plane tickets and surgery are not (or not always!) art works. But art works aren’t always art works either - I could buy works of an up and coming artist as an investment, or sell photos from my friends if they become famous. I think music performance may be a better parallel: one of my all-time favorite memories is the time I saw Jawbreaker and Jawbox play a show together at the Metro in Chicago in the 90s. I went expecting the performance to be unique and it was (Jawbreaker stood in the wings and watched Jawbox play “Capillary Life” and sang along to themselves, I told this story to a former member of Jawbox later and he was moved by it - I tell the details mostly to support the claim to singularity). But the performance was also a commodity - I bought it, the club/promoter made a profit from it, etc.

Last thing, I’ve been thinking more to see if there’s anything else at stake in my objections than wanting Marx to be right (I know you’re not attacking Marx), and while this wasn’t my intent, I think one corrallary to all of this may the question of what is and isn’t commodifiable. I take it to be implied in your argument that things with real artness aren’t commodifiable, or not fully so. I don’t have an argument really but I generally operate from the assumption that any human interest or desire or use value or whatever we call it is commodifiable. Put differently, there aren’t a priori limits to commodifiability. I might be wrong about that, but that’s my gut feeling. (I know you’ve said that art works can be a sort of quasi-commodity where a version of commodity logic is still operating.) I retained very little from it so I can’t point to anything relevant in the book, but you might take a look at Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory related to this. I think Marcuse has an aesthetics related book too.

Put differently, I don’t think use values of any sort are necessarily problematic for/as commodities. I think status as a commodity is a mode of control of access to use values, and any use values are at least potentially subject to that sort of control.

take care,
 Nate

So the artwork is a sensual pleasure for its consumer and owner but over a certain level of social labour involved in it, it is also capital, you can trade it for money which you can trade for a portfolio of different assets whose sensuality, whose human use value, is less intense and whose collectively produced quality is less obvious. Perhaps possessing artworks and keeping them in one’s residence of office helps the rich feel their social mastery as what it is; looking at these things you can experience the power, possession and mastery over human life, over human culture and human history, more vividly than glancing at your portfolio of shares of equivalent value. Though finally it is the same, a major painting or a stock portfolio, title to a portion of the alienated surplus of the whole of social production. The ‘social factory’ theorising raises this but what I prefer about Beller’s case is that he doesn’t see this as annulling the law of value (rendering exploitation and accumulation mysterious or transforming it into nothing but biopolitical control by the state with no real motive or logic and sidelining the importance of property) but confirming it.

anyhoo thanks for the conversation

I think I’ve come around to being able to grasp how this works. The great mass of unwaged labor, indirectly monetized via the ownership of (singular) revered objects. If the authenticity of objects were impossible — if they were reproducible and evaluated in terms of a general use — this would be impossible.

But thanks for the comments: very helpful.

Oh, I’m not trying to take art away from Marx! I’m just trying to come to grips with how art production works under capitalism; it doesn’t seem to follow the general laws of commodity-production Marx lays out in vol i, and for that reason alone I wanted to distinguish it from commodities. But it’s still treated and traded as if it were a commodity, under the commodity-form, etc. But the rules for valorization of art-objects seem to be different. But I’m perfectly willing to take back the statement that art != commodity, unless it’s understood to mean only that art-object’s values as singular things makes them take on value in distinct ways.

I’ve been thinking about what LCC said in regards to authenticity and ownership, and I think that it’s there that the rub really is for the production of artness, as opposed to use-value of generic commodities. Artworks are evaluated because and through their singularity, as the sole example of this or that Great One’s effort at this or that time; because of social property relations, all the loving glances turned toward accrue to a single thing. The social use value of the art object demands this: the Mona Lisa as socially functioning art-object, with its coy smile, its home behind glass, etc, is perfectly one and owned. All the faux Mona Lisa’s, the posters and fridge magnets, etc, descend back down into the generality of indistinct use-values that can be interchanged, and hence competive productive pressures and all the rest brings them far closer to what we’d (or I’d) want to call a commodity proper.

And hence the fact that one person or corporate entity can own the artwork. The value of the singular piece becomes a great reified example of all the effort and thought that people put into thinking, knocking off, co-opting, referencing etc. it.

So I think the big issue is the singularity inherent in the social use-value of these objects. Normal commodities (sandwiches, tee shirts, tee vees) are “indistinct,” in the sense that one sandwich made by you or me or that guy over there are all socially useful, and their value is determined by socially necessary labor time. But only one — or 90, in the case of the tins — art object is authentic, and the social relations that determine its social value make it the property of a given individual.

so I think also, no matter how one feels about whether some individual art thing is a commodity, i don’t think there can be any doubt that derivatives are commodities. so even if impressionist paintings are not commodities, impressionist futures are, and they will exist soon, they already notionally exist. the paintings and sculptures that an art fund owns may not be commodities, but the shares in the fund are certainly commodities. if a publicly traded corporation buys those shit cans, then every shareholder owns some of those shitcans, its no more difficult to commodify that than to commodify its other assets, the office space, the furniture, whatever else it owns.

commodity signifies a relation, its not a character of a physical thing. every commodity is more/other than merely commodityness. even dollar bills all have unique serial numbers, no two are exactly the same.

with digital copies we come closer to something really really interchangeable and identical. interestingly artworks (like currency) are one of the few things, “goods”, that can actually take this form, infinitely reproducible as absolutely identical copies with no original, while lots of commodities - most - can’t ever be that interchangeable and identical.

anyway, funnelling away and storing out of circulation. I’m not sure this is true now though once perhaps it was. Artworks at the level we are talking about don’t seem to take capital out of circulation. They’re easily leveraged, they are pretty liquid, more and more are owned by funds and corporations which issue shares.

but say this was the role, storage out of circulation. the relations between these objects used this way still have to make some kind of sense. it’s not conspiracy and it can’t be caprice. the market is not volatile. works appreciate. it’s quite reliable, it’s not especially erratic or influenced by changes in taste or anything like that. there is a speculative bet in every sale of course, as with real estate and stock, a portion of the value is fictitious, an expectation of future alienated labour, but in comparison to other things of this kind artworks are pretty stable, not as volatile as things traded in wildly liquid markets of course. a manet doesn’t jerk up and down in value like a hunk of gold. there has to be some explanation for the permanent value artworks acquire and their stable relations to one another and to things whose value we know is a portion of total surplus labour - to money.

i think its a question of value produced initially in commons enclosed and continuing to be produced. there are a lot of professional artness producers, some who work at for profit enterprises like auction houses but many working at universities, museums, academies, institutes: they are retained by the class of people who possess art, who possess capital assets in the form of fine art. i think cultural production has existed, a lot has been produced, that’s not capitalised but now more and more is capitalised and in more reliable and systematic ways. liquidity clarifies values. As with fine art indexes, and one day soon enough derivatives. At root, artworks are more than commodities, and so is labour power, the common denominator of all commodities, as is anything else that’s commodified except perhaps financial instruments which exist only electronically.

take care,
 Nate

I agree with Jasper, this is a really good conversation. Thanks all. JCD, I don’t know if there’s much at stake in our difference of opinion and I don’t know why I want to keep art as commodities, probably just that I want Marx to explain or at least contain most everything. I agree that there are important distinctions between the types of objects we’re discussing here and items of mass consumption, I just see that as a distinction within/among commodities.

I should back up, actually. I don’t want to claim “art=commodity” in all cases, rather I want to quibble with what I take to be your claim that “art≠commodity.” (Let me know if I got you wrong here.) I want to say that there’s no contradiction as such between the categories “art” and “commodity.” I’m not sure how to do this yet. I want to think about it. For now, here’s some Marx quotes, from the Theories of Surplus Value.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch04.htm

“productive labour as labour which is directly exchanged with capital (…) These definitions are therefore not derived from the material characteristics of labour (neither from the nature of its product nor from the particular character of the labour as concrete labour), but from the definite social form, the social relations of production, within which the labour is realised. An actor, for example, or even a clown, according to this definition, is a productive labourer if he works in the service of a capitalist (an entrepreneur) to whom he returns more labour than he receives from him in the form of wages; while a jobbing tailor who comes to the capitalist’s house and patches his trousers for him, producing a mere use-value for him, is an unproductive labourer. (…) A writer is a productive labourer not in so far as he produces ideas, but in so far as he enriches the publisher who publishes his works, or if he is a wage-labourer for a capitalist. The use-value of the commodity in which the labour of a productive worker is embodied may be of the most futile kind. The material characteristics are in no way linked with its nature which on the contrary is only the expression of a definite social relation of production. It is a definition of labour which is derived not from its content or its result, but from its particular social form.”

This is probably a roundabout way to get to art and commodities, but I think the quote makes it clear that for Marx some of this stuff can be productive of surplus value. Presumably this means that it’s commodity productive. Also to the extent that actors, clowns, and writers can produce art, this might be an argument for artworks as commodities. I suspect that this “Marx sort of said!” claim isn’t sufficient or satisfying, I hope it’s at least a bit helpful. :)

take care,
 Nate

I’d suggest that’s what’s happening at an art auction. The same way as any other commodity – the alienated labour is exchanged for money.

Perhaps the question is how is this labour alienated. But it’s the same too – you get people to produce something that you own.

http://www.nysun.com/arts/seeking-a-hedge-for-art/60389/