While we’re on the topic of how art becomes a commodity, there’s this news about the Upper East Side art dealer Lawrence Salander: apparently he has a history of this sort of thing. I’m intrigued to see how the operation of the gallery was organized, and to see how exactly Salander (allegedly) turned selling art into a Ponzi scheme. It might shed some light on the way that the value of an artwork is determined.

Roger writes on instincts, those gut-impulses that guide policy decisions at the highest levels, at the very summit of our kleptocracy:

The rule for the nobility is, of course, that the government should interfere with their compensation only to the extent of spending as much money as possible to make sure they are well and bountifully compensated. Imagine the loss to country clubs everywhere if AIG had not been a convenient conduit to smuggle money to Bank of America, Societe General, and — more than anything else - our dear and beloved Goldman Sachs. Luckily, after a Goldman Sachs alum as Treasury Secretary had a meeting with the Goldman Sachs CEO and AIG about what the Government could do to help AIG pay off Goldman Sachs to the dollar, that compensation issue was handled neatly - with the appointment of another Goldman Sachs alum, Neel Kashkari, to oversee things.

My instincts would be [insert joke about the, weep buckets over the] takeover of the American government by an openly corrupt and unaccountable system that generates people with their own instincts for things - Pavlovian kleptocrats, one might call them. This is corruption on a scale that was never dreamt of before - Grant’s foolish son in law, who was drawn into a Gold Ring, and the Teapot Dome figures look like amiable goofs compared to the Bush-Obama era of looting. All of course signed, sealed and propagandized for by economists who have a mother’s love for the Great Moderation.

Sad, how instincts can be so debauched.

Damn the luck. Fortunately malt extract and yeast will remain at pre-crisis tax levels.

It’s not that I don’t find the 165 million paid out in bonuses to be disgusting, enraging and cause for aggressive response, I do. But I also recognize that AIG will have received upwards of 180 billion. If we’re going to demand accountability, let’s demand it on more than less than one percent.

In case you needed a reason. What I don’t understand is why the PR machine that drives the yuppie-tastic image at Whole Foods doesn’t see the waste of the deli and other places as potential feel good fodder; make it a hyped up, big deal that all waste is open for employees to take, and what they do not use, send to shelters. It would contribute to the (false) aura of the Whole Foods franchise as one committed to environmental and social justice. This will never happen, but still.

When I worked at Starbucks several years ago, we, the baristas who did not get enough hours to get benefits, and those who did, all took sandwiches and pastries. The management fired you if they found out about this; but they didn’t make much of an effort to look, because there wasn’t a directive from corporate at the time to cut back on employment. The only reason this guy was fired for taking a sandwich is because Whole Foods has lost revenue and they are looking for ways to cut jobs.

Ho ho ho! I’ve been out of blogging recently — in fact, I owe several people comments here and elsewhere, but hey, I’ve been buslazy. Anyway, Dean Baker has something rather interesting to say:

I enjoy reading about the hardships of Citigroup and Bank of America as much as anyone, but when the real wages of ordinary workers are soaring, it should merit at least some small bit of attention from the media. Since nominal wages have continued to increase in recent months, even as prices have plummeted, the real wage of workers lucky enough to keep their jobs has soared.

Over the last three months, the average hourly wage for production and non-supervisory workers has risen at an incredible 23.4 percent annual rate. This is an important story. If the stimulus can sustain demand so higher unemployment does not weaken the labor market too much and force down nominal wages, then we will have seen a substantial downward redistribution of income as result of this crash.

Of course, the other key factor in the distribution of income will be the efforts of the financial sector to grab taxpayer dollars through the TARP and other mechanisms. The government may act as it has in the past to offset the effect of market forces and push income upwards.

Sometimes I like conceptual art. Like this piece above by Manzoni: the base of the world. The base of the world! It stands on nothing but thin air. It’s clever, but it’s a bit of a one liner. And after you tease out its implications — groundlessness, the world itself as a work of creation — there’s not much else, and the work itself is a bit boring. The limits of the concept impose themselves, and then a piece’s unidimensionality spells its own ruin. It becomes “cute” or “trite.”

Othertimes though a piece becomes more interesting inspite of itself. Like another one by Manzoni, “Artist’s Shit.” The gag for this one was a bit more performative than that of the base of the world: Manzoni collected his shit and then split it into 30g specimens, divided into 90 cans. He labeled each can with its contents, and then sold each for its weight in gold. Ho ho! The art world’s luminaries understand this as a comment on commodification and reification of the artist’s product — explicitly here, his solid waste. But this doesn’t really comprehend what’s going on; or it only grasps part of it. Because while there is certainly something like commodification going on here, strictly speaking our 90 cans of Manzoni’s solid waste are not commodities proper. If there were, someone else could have shat in a can and sold it for its weight in silver, and thereby driven Manzoni out of, as it were, the shit business.

So there is something else at play in the sale of art in the upper reaches. Those that shell out 50,000 GBP for a 30g, oxidized tin of what very well might be shit are after something other than commodities, and the amount they pay for something is caught up in far more complex process than its costs of production — even in the most simple picture. To get at this would require looking at the complex sequence of events and choices that lends a certain artist the aura or cachet that makes his or her work appear as a constant store of value — the rich do not spend upwards of a 100,000 dollars on one of Manzoni’s tins only to debase it by opening it up to find out just what is inside.

Commodification and reification are presupposed in the production of works like “Artist’s Shit.” But they are not what the work is about, even on a functional level. In order for the art world to function, in its semi-autonomous way, over and above the more basic and brutal labor-market, a given amount of liquidity has to be transfered to the buyers and devotees that make it up, and this transfer is effected by the motor of commodity-production. Of course this is the case. But this is not sufficient for a given art-object to be vaulted into Sotheby’s ambit. A peculiar anticipation of an object’s continued value, in spite of being a bit of shit, or a heap of junk, is what allows Manzoni’s tins to function as art. Hence there is little irony in the fact that people buy it, or a pissoir, despite both being recepticles of human waste. Not only are the buyers playing a role within a specific social milieu where there is a status attached to owning a bit of Manzoni, they are anticipating future worth.

This does not mean, either, that anything can be art. It means that almost nothing can. So you have to wonder who the joke is on.

My reading group is taking a look at Harry Cleaver’s essay on the development of Marx’s conception of financial crises that was put up in The Commoner in 2002. It’s a quick read, and a nice exegesis; Cleaver certainly draws a neat line from Marx’s earlier take of crises being a result of overproduction to his later understanding of them as a result of underconsumption. Some of his argumentation relating to the imposition of work, however, seems to me to be a bit flat, or maybe just a bit too abstracted.

The theory of value cannot, I believe, be separated from the generalized imposition of wage labor.  The “value” of things that Marx is analyzing all throughout Capital, and the way that it contributes to the relation between the rich and the poor within commodity producing societies, is sustained by the process of paying a given sect of society an amount of money with the understanding that another sect will make more money in the act. (The actual status of money in this scheme, as measure of value, is also important, and not to be taken at its face.) Outside this specific regulation of social relations in order to achieve this end — specific regulation that is often crassly violent and crudely oppressive — there is no “value,” in the market sense, as such.

I don’t think this comes across with Cleaver writes the following:

Given that value is an accounting tool to keep track of whether or not capital is successfully expanding its social control through the imposition of work, it should be hardly surprising that Marx’s “theory of value” is a “labor” theory. For Marx, the object of the value analysis, and thus its substance, is  work (in its quality as means of social control or “abstract labor”); its measure is time (socially necessary labor time); and its form is exchange (exchange value). The value concept allows the comparison and measure of all kinds of work, by abstracting from specific differences (23).

To put it more precisely: value is not some much a “concept” as a hegemonic social measure that is remade in every signing of a contract for a day’s wage, reconstituted in every salary agreement, throughout the entire scope of a given society.