ART IN CURRENCY: COMMODIFICATION OF ART OR SOCIAL VALUE?

Who is the true producer of the value of the work –

the painter or the dealer, the writer or the

publisher, the playwright or the theatre manager?

Among the makers of the work of art we must [even]

include the public, which helps to make its value by

appropriating it materially (collectors) or

symbolically (audiences, readers), and by

objectively or subjectively identifying part of its

own value with these appropriations.’ (Bourdieau,

1993)

At the beginning of the last century, the Dada movement

originated with Duchamp changed how art or the artistic

field produced artworks. His readymades transformed the

way we look at art today. It became a new language with

infinite possibilities of reinvention. It crossed and

questioned the borders between high art and low art, and

the dicothomy of art and artefact, creating new grounds

of expression to be explored by artists. It established a

change in the question what is art to the question when

it is art?. What was important to rescue from the art

object where the subjects or agents which where involved

in the cultural and artistic field who had the authority

to say whether an artobject was art or not. The

aesthetization of an art object was much more implied

within all the actors/agents that negotiated the meaning,

symbolism or language embodied by the object, piece,

action or process.

In this essay, instead of analysing the question what is

art? Or when is art? I will instead focus on the question

How is art? I will discuss different approaches with

regards on the sphere of cultural production in today’s

contemporary art. Within this field I will incorporate

the analysis of three examples of artists that used money

or currency as subject matter or as a means to create

meaning and other kind of relations.

Money or political economy has been a recurrent subject

matter in the art world. In the art world this can be

done, through questioning the state of art as a

commodity, the link of the art world to the economic

system, with how art is valued either through auctions or

public opinion, or among other spheres.

Is not only money which is in question but the

institutions behind the arts world. Art has used the

image of money as a representational figure, as an index,

a referent of political economy; also money can be

approached as a way of linking people, detonating a

poiesis, an open process of transforming structures

through alternative uses of money and there is also the

approach of money as a material to be used in the

production of an art work.

The art world is a small community where the artists can

be appreciated as just employees for the auction market

or creators activating thought, knowledge, and value.

Artists are a mirror of their time and generation and

their creative process is more likely to come organically

as a response to their environment and as a response to

the social contingency. Nevertheless, artists also have

to respond to a market to make possible their survival as

artists. Therefore, due to the need of negotiation, and

because art is a form of expression, and a means where

intersubjectivities connect, art is a way of becoming

political.

The economic recession became appealing and seductive

among the art world to take advantage from. Art transform

the economic recession into an opportunity to rethink the

economic system in terms of social value. As Appadurai

(1988) makes notice, in his book Philosophy of Money,

Georg Simmel makes an analysis on how value is built

through the social economic exchange. In this, Simmel

define value as a judgement made about objects by

subjects. Therefore, value is constituted as a social

relation, an exchange of ideas built upon objects. For

Simmel, the key to understand value lies in the region

where “that subjectivity is only provisional and actually

not very essential”. He links value to our level of

desire acquired by the distance constructed between

different persons to certain objects. He calls certain

objects as valuable because they resist our desire to

possess them. As Appadurai suggests, Simmel calls the

economic objects as those that “exist in the space

between pure desire and immediate enjoyment, with some

distance between them and the person who desires

them”(Appadurai,1988:3)

The ambivalence of art as a commodity and an object with

its own power and value enhances as well as diminish the

power of the art speech within a society. But what happen

when there is no object in art? Where is the value? The

answer is: in the ideas. Taking art as a tool to create

new forms of relations empower the active or passive

viewers or indirect agents of the artistic endeavour. For

Bourriaud, “relational art” is “Art taking as its

theoretical horizon the whole of human interactions and

its social context, rather than the assertion of an

independent and private symbolic space (In Roger Sansi,

2009:293).

In Siegel and Mattick, 2004, the authors analyze the

relation between art and money going from an historical

review of these relations to an arbitrary classification

of artists and their different approaches. In their work

there are several names of artists that had been repeated

along the different aspects of money that they point out.

Names like Cildo Meireles, Andreas Gursky, Rob Pruitt,

Andrea Bowers, Tom Friedman, Tom Otterness, Joseph Beuys

and Takashi Murakami, are all names that had worked over

more than one aspect of money. We can say there has been

a specialization of artists towards money as a response

to the needs of the market and the social context. For

instance a great example of this are the diverse art

shows around the globe that use Money as their main

subject, being the social context, one of the biggest

economic recessions in the whole world.

MONEY AS A SUBJECT MATTER

As Alan Moore (2004) claims, artistic treatments of

economic themes inherently question settled

understandings, and many contest things as they are.

Moore evidence this through his review of the conditions

of artistic production and the historical exegesis of

explicit and implicit theme of political economy in

modern and postmodern art. His study reveals that there

are special conditions that enables the art production to

embody political economic questions. Among these

conditions there is a gift economy (in Marcel Mauss

terms) that operates within the art world. Conditions

like time, materials, opportunities and ideas are

considered by Moore as gifts that makes the work of art

possible. Other conditions are mutual aid, competition

and the collective process of production.

Regarding this latter condition Okwi Enwezor (2004)

states in his article “the artist as producer in times of

crisis”, that ‘recent confrontations within the field of

contemporary art have precipitated an awareness that

there have emerged (…), new critical, artistic formations

thatforeground and privilege the mode of collective and

collaborative production’. Moreover he emphasizes that

this spirit is not new but has been discussed by Walter

Benjamin and Lukacs in their essays regarding modern art,

and that it has been particularly reinforced in the 1960s

collective art and in today’s times. As Enwezor notes,

Benjamin's lectureaddressed the question of the artist's

or writer'scommitment under certain social conditions.

This wouldlead him to ask "What is the attitude of a work

to therelations of production of its time?"

To answer this question posit above we must firstly

analyze the social conditions in today’s social sphere.

The economic recession within a globalized world have

resulted in an increase of the mobility of population

from poorer countries to richer ones. It has also had an

impact on the increase of the need of networks to soften

these changes. Moreover, politics are revealed to merge

with economic behaviour more than ever. With this in

mind, communities have strengthen their bonds in order to

be empowered with a voice or action to confront this

crisis. Internet, and new media have for one side

homogenized certain behaviour of consumption, but this

has been adjusted or appropriated by local communities to

fit their own schemes of values, but at the same time

this new objects insert new values through this relations

of exchange. Following this facts, the art scene has a

lot to say in the ways we generate value or create

relations of exchange.

In first place, there is an unmistakeable connection

between the idea of the avant-garde and speculative

investment in art:

“Market competition to embody the true spirit of

modernity fitted with the idea, natural to an era

that celebrated its commitment to progress, of an

historical progression of great artists and art

movements; thus competing galleries showcased the

series of competing avant-gardes –Cubism, Futurism,

Purism, Dadaism, Surrealism- structuring the history

of modern art. As a student of these development

observed: ‘These ‘isms’ are not just the great

creative flow of a generation, but a mentality,

haunted by the need for originality, by the need to

supersede one’s competitors, by the desire to get a

piece of the market share, to be discussed.

“(SIEGEL, K.& MATTICK P. 2004:21)

Secondly, art, in its relational capacity, weaves new

possible scenarios, either material or symbolically. Art

production is in short terms, production of possible

values. It reflects a state of mind, a critical or

uncritical reflection upon today’s social behaviour:

‘Art was intended to prepare and announce a future

world: today it is modelling possible universes.’

(Bourriaud, 1998)

Moreover, Bourriaud adds that ‘Art is the place that

produces a specific sociability. It remains to be seen

what the status of this is in the set of “states of

encounter” proposed by the City. (op.cit., p.16).

Although it is true, the public should be aware of the

conditions and the limits where this sociability is

produced. People involved in relational art knows that

this is a new avant garde, which creates more value in

their brand name as an artist. Although it really involve

people in the public sphere, the artists used them as

agents to develop a social production of new meaning.

As Svazek (2007) points out, ‘if artistic prestige and

aesthetic values are actively created in art markets, it

is of major importance to study carefully the interaction

of key players who operate in these markets and to

develop a theoretical framework that takes their

interaction into account’. Moreover she mentions that in

1982, the sociologist Howard Becker introduced the

concept of the ‘art world’, as an analytical tool meant

to examine forms of cooperation between artists and

others involved in the art trade. Becker defines the art

world as ‘a way of talking about people who routinely

participate in the making of artworks. The routine of

interaction is what constitutes the art world’s

existence, so questions of definition can generally be

resolved by looking who actually does what with whom.’

(Svazek 2007:91)

Here, Becker obliquely looks at the art world in terms of

a relational approach, much closer to Marcel Mauss’s

concept about the use of the gift as a way of gaining

status (or value) through relations built by

reciprocity.

In this essay I will discuss the work of three artists

that creates value by inserting their art within the

public sphere: Minerva Cuevas, with her project S-COOP;

Banksy with his work in street art; and Cildo Meireles

with his work of the Ideological Circuits.

Minerva Cuevas is an internationally recognized Mexican

artist that uses a wide range of media and artistic

approaches for her artistic purposes. Her practice is

about actions and interventions inscribed within the

urban everyday life that question the capitalist economy

of today and addresses contemporary political issues.

Her major and most recognized project (still in

circulation) is Mejor Vida Corp (Better Life

Corporation), a multinational and non- profit

corporation. This project started in 1998 in Mexico City

and consists in the creation of a real corporation that

instead of generating money, provides tools and

strategies for the people to use for a better quality of

life within everyday consumer practices. She mimics the

corporate capitalist economic structure to subvert it.

For this she uses and appropriates the available

corporate strategies to generate actions that escape the

capitalist rationale. Examples of the activities of this

project include the free distribution of student identity

cards, public transportation tickets, lottery tickets, or

barcode tickets that reduces the prices on supermarket

food. She does this through fund raising and private

sponsorship, creating paradox of her role as an art

producer in the context of the commodification of art.

Her latest project developed for The Whitechapel gallery

among the The Street commissions, a series of community

based projects next to Petticoat Lane market, is named S-

coop. In the 1900s people of Petticoat Lane market were

organized through cooperatives that operated with tokens

as a way of exchange and supply themselves of basic

products like milk and bread. Cuevas’project is about

connecting the people of Petticoat Lane Market with their

history and to generate an alternative logic of exchange,

introducing a different coin to be exchanged for ice

cream in the gallery, which has also been transformed

into an ice-cream parlour. In doing so, she reveals

through its opposite, the kind of relationships the

capitalist economic systems builds.

She named the coin S-COOP as a game of words. From one

side is the ice cream scoop, and from another side “coop”

also stands for cooperatives. The word s-coop also looks

similar to the word scope, as it can be also interpreted

as a gaze over the art institutions and how they operate.

Minerva cuevas’s way of operating can be interpreted also

as a commentary on the commodification of art and the

boundaries of the artistic spaces. As her project

unfolds, it starts to build bridges between spaces and

“worlds” that have been separated in the social

imaginary, as a mental separation built up with

preconceptions and habitus.

Two thousand s-coops were available to be given to the

traders and people of the market to use at their wish.

Nevertheless her game has certain rules to follow as

guidelines. Among these rules there is a relation with

value. The ways to get the scoop was through the

newsagent paying the equivalence in pounds of 1.20, or if

you get also something from the shop you could have a

discount of 20p. Also you could receive the scoop as

change in your purchase of objects from the market

traders. Nonetheless these were just guidelines to be

followed, there was always the option of getting it

through other ways.

In my interview with Minerva Cuevas I could realize that

the intentions of the artist was to design a social

experiment and to observe what could happen with this new

rules of the game in the context of the life around the

market. In my observations I witness only few people took

advantage of the hidden strategy offered by Cuevas in

order to benefit the people of the market. The strategy

consisted in giving the scoop as a form of change to the

buyers, keeping the change in pounds for themselves using

the ice-cream as a hook; other way of seeing it was to

ask for the coins and keep it as an artistic souvenir, or

collect it as a numismatic piece. Nevertheless, most of

the people gave away the coins to the kids in the

neighbourhood, or changed them themselves for a free ice-

cream.

It is interest to notice that although there were certain

‘norms’ these were transformed and appropriated by the

traders in order to suit their own schemes of value. An

example of this is the use of the scoop as an exchange of

favours as noticed between the traders and the homeless

people that sometimes help them. Here Marcel Mauss ‘s

economy based on the gift ir particularly exemplified.

The reciprocity condition in their relations was the main

purpose and motivation in playing Cuevas’ game.

Less people was aware of the artistic value that the

tokens had. Minerva Cuevas is an important name (brand)

within the art world. None of them knew about the

potential value that the scoop had. None of them knew who

was Minerva Cuevas. There is a question of knowledge

implicit in the project. In my status as an

anthropologist I helped to create the rumour about the

existence of this art project among the market traders. I

asked them about the scoop, how to get it from, or if

they knew who the artist was, etc.

It is interesting the way that the project also activates

knowledge about the place, and also, can be a way of

questioning the idea of identity as a fixed meaning. In

my research in Petticoat Lane Market, I interviewed a few

people of the market, the elder ones, asking them if they

knew that the market used to be organized in cooperatives

in the beginning of last century: none of them replied in

a positive way. This enhances the utility of Cuevas

project in activating not just new relations but also

knowledge about the history of the place. By having

people from the market inside the gallery creating

communication between both worlds, Cuevas’ showed that

both worlds could be interrelated through the scoop and

the ice cream. Therefore, Cuevas project directly

provoked an impact outside the walls of the gallery, by

interfering in the public realms. Both, the gallery and

the traders shared the same place, so why they didn’t

communicate before? Cuevas’ work also can be interpreted

as a comment on the social distinctions created in both

worlds. Each world had a particular habitus in

Bourdieau’s terms.

Her project can be read as social experiment. She inserts

a new element in a system and see how it reacts upon it.

For system I refer to the social network involving

people, institutions, place and time. I already referred

to people and place, now let me observe the time factor

within this project. In time there is always a

contingency of events. In Cuevas’ project, today economic

crisis as framework intensifies the strength of her

project conceptually by dealing with an alternative

currency inserting with it a new logic of exchange. Here,

the impact of the project within the artworld is much

broader. Nevertheless, in terms of a social experiment,

it was not sufficient enough. The artist had a period of

one month to have her work going on, which was

insufficient to be appropriated by the people of the

market as a possible alternative to resist the economic

crisis and pull their way through this new logic of

exchange.

What is interesting in Cuevas project is that she goes

beyond the limits of the art world to make her statement

as an artist. She makes her art within the public sphere

transforming the people of the community as social agents

to create her statement. How does she do this? By

Creating new forms of relations based in the gift

economy. She transforms herself as a social mediator

between the people of the market and the art world,

crossing the boundaries between art and life. As Sansi

Roca(Sansi 2009:294) writes in response of Bourriaud’s

Relational esthetics, for the artist wanting to make a

social statement, it is apparent that his [her] activity

as a social mediator has to go a bit beyond his immediate

sphere of practice in the art world. An example of the

impact of Minerva Cuevas project can be the foundation of

the Brixton pound as a way of activating economic

exchange within the community of Brixton.

Relating the work with the public sphere is a political

statement. As Appadurai claims, politics is the mediating

level between exchange and value. For him, value is

embodied in the commodities that are exchanged, invested

by value built through the reciprocity of the exchange.

Moreover, he adds that commodities like persons have a

social life, embodied in the construction of their value.

After the military coup occurred in Brazil in 1964,

artist Cildo Meireles started to develop his work in

¨political art. His major and most renowned project was

called Insertions Into Ideological Circuits, which not

only avoid the brazilian censorship, but also reached a

much larger audience. The project started in 1970 and

followed until 1976 and consisted in printing messages

and images onto various items that were icons of

capitalism, the new era of Brazil economic politics after

the coup. Among these items were banknotes and Coca-Cola

bottles (subject to recycling by a deposit scheme).

Between 1974 and 1978 Meireles continued working with

money as a subject matter in other ways. An example of

this was the production of replicas of banknotes and

coins which appeared very much alike to the US dollar or

the Brazilian Cruzeiro, but with zero denominations

written on them. They were called Zero Dollars and Zero

Cruzeiros.  

Here, there are three factors to observe: Time,

appropriation, anonymity. Among the first factor the

efficacy of the work is greater than the recent work of

Minerva Cuevas in terms of the social impact. As

Mejorvidacorp, the project still in circulation, Meireles

circuit lasted years. The difference is the way to

diffuse (difundir) their work in terms of the production

of the work. Minerva Cuevas in mejorvida corp, diffuse

her work through a website and the physical realms of her

corporation. Meireles in the 1970s diffused his work

through the circulation of banknotes and Coca cola

bottles, icons of the serial production of the post

fordist economic structure. Commodities or products of

the capitalist system that he critics imprinting on them

messages like “yankees go home!”. Meireles plays with

irony using the system as Minerva Cuevas does with both

of her works mentioned before. Her project scoop is an

attempt to resist the process of the commodification of

art.

And the second project refers to the question of value in

a capitalist system, the banknote with zero cruzeiros and

zero dollars are an obvious example for this. It reveals

the materiality of the currency as a piece of paper

detaching the meaning socially invested upon it. It also

question and critics the value of money in our society.

The zero can be interpreted as a void, an emptiness in

our social values.  

With Cildo Meireles, there is no boundaries between art

and political activism. The artist carries his homeland

history within his work. He raises awareness of the

political situation in Brazil through the effectiveness

or better said affective ness of his work. As Bourriaud

claims ‘Contemporary art is definitely developing a

political project when it endeavours to move into the

relational realm by turning into an issue’.  Although the

artist carries political intentions, its policies are not

always comprehended by a wider public. It is the network

of art dealers, buyers, social researchers and art

historians the ones that create value to his artwork.

Another artist that have worked with currency but in a

different way is the street artist, Banksy. In 2004

Banksy copied ten-pounds notes but instead of having the

queen as the image printed on the banknote, he used

princess Diana´s image instead. In doing so Banksy makes

a mockery about the queens´public image substituting it

for the pop icon that Diana´s image has turned to.

In this swap of images there is an open critic to the

image of the queen in terms of value. Using the index of

the currency as a reference of value, there is a public

speech and critique towards the image of the queen.

Here, Banksy appropriates the ten pound notes value as a

public canvas, or public space, using the image of

princess Diana as a popular icon, which represents better

the popular affectiveness towards royalty and its duties.

The exhibition of this ¨unusual currency¨ was located in

an alternative shop only open in the period of christmas

named ¨Santa´s Ghetto¨. The concept store rallied against

the commercialisation of Christmas by selling lots of

things. This concept store that sells art objects is also

an open critique to the commoditization of the artworld

and the ghetto that the art world embodies.

THE ART WORLD

The art world is a network built through

intersubjectivities creating value for art production.

There are different approaches regarding this matter. An

important theorist is Pierre Bourdieau. He constructed a

theory of art which rendered both the importance of

everyday social interaction to the art trade with an

analyses of the process were cultural capital and its

value come about. He analyzed the aesthetic preferences

of French art consumers founding a link between,

lifestyle, social class and taste. (Bourdieau 1984) The

latter reinforced his view that people tend to

internalise group or class-specific behaviour, thereby

sharing the same ‘habitus’. (Bourdieau 1993)

Another view, which is not antagonist at all to the

latter is the view of Alfred Gell. In his book Art and

Agency, Gell builds the theory of the art nexus, where

the artists become agents of a communicational system

build through the art nexus. Here Gell focus in the art

object used as a link , or better, as a node where

multiple connections convey. As Bourdieau, Gell

emphasizes the relational device of the artistic

endeavour.

CONCLUSIONS

Art is a social production that involves artists,

dealers, curators, social researchers and, of course,

buyers. Although it is subject to the market guidelines,

the value of art is a sum of diverse negotiations between

the agents previously mentioned. It is through these

interactions of subjectivities where art is valued.

Minerva Cuevas work posits the question about the ways of

how value is obtained. She does this through a relational

approach, creating new ways of relating with a certain

object. She gives away the scoops among the traders of

the market, the exchange in this relation can be the

possibility of making her art happen using the people of

the market as her agents, carrying meanings within their

interconnections.

In Meireles case, the value is built through the

distribution of the message printed in the coca cola

bottles, renewed by the recycle or recirculation of the

bottles carrying a new ingredient in them: ideas. Its

value is also subject to the historical social context,

and also, subject to the context of the state of art by

that time. Meireles uses the gaps of the system to

subvert it. It appropriates the capitalist way of

operating, to disseminate his work. The production of his

work using this logic reaches much wider audiences

without thinking about the economic value of his work,

but in the reciprocity of the relation, the symbolical

value instead. He gives away a message with a meaning

built through his actions as a gift to the audience, and

reciprocally the art world invest his actions with

symbolical value. His zero cruzeiros and zero dollars

fulfil the same aims.

In Banksy’s case symbolical value is question through the

swaping of images. The authority of the queen, the

relationship of power with money are exemplified and

questioned by the only gesture of swaping images on to

the ten pound notes.

It is interesting to notice the proximity between artist

ways of operating with advertising strategies. By

transforming, suggesting, implying, or through

interventions and transgressions of the normal

functioning, artists make their way through the art world

as signifyers of new values or meanings and as brands

trying to get a piece of the market share.

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