The commodification of art

In his Royal Academy speech last month, the critic Robert Hughes savagely attacked the high prices paid for works of art. Such prejudice against the market is irrational, yet it can be found everywhere, most worryingly in UNESCO.

   'The present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is
   a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for
   an immature Rose Period Picasso--close to the GNP of some Caribbean
   or African states--something is very rotten. Such gestures do no
   honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it
   pathological ... no painting is worth a hundred million dollars.'
   Robert Hughes in The Guardian, 3 June 2004

   'With the rise in the market value and prestige of art in the
   sixties, ideas in art have correspondingly depreciated ... today,
   art exists, but it lacks a reason for existing except as a medium
   of exchange, a species of money.' Harold Rosenberg in The New
   Yorker, 20 August 1973

   'When a culture's common aesthetic patrimony becomes just another
   commodity, everyone is made poorer.'
   Editorial, Los Angeles Times, 24 October 1989

These quotations illustrate a curious sort of inverse philistinism among some art critics, art historians and artists who lament, among other things, the 'irrationality' of the art market, its tendency to treat works of art as mere 'commodities', and the 'distortion of artistic values' it causes. Are these critics right? Does money drive out good art? Is the artist inevitably corrupted by the opportunity to acquire wealth? Is a brisk market for works of art a sign of aesthetic decay? Is 'commodification' of art evil?

It is not always clear what people mean by commodification or why they think it is undesirable. Ono possible meaning--that the work of art is itself somehow reduced or sullied by being bought and sold (a Spanish Minister of Culture Javier Solana was quoted as saying: 'We could not allow something which we consider part of our historical artistic heritage ... to become the object of common trade') (1)--surely does not bear scrutiny. If Van Gogh's Irises brings a high price at auction, that is an indication that the work is highly regarded by the art world: by art historians, critics, connoisseurs and museum curators, as well as by dealers and collectors. The painting is hardly demeaned by market confirmation of this high opinion of the artist and his work; if anything, it is aggrandised by it.

But suppose that the work is bought by someone who has little interest in art other than as an investment, someone who treats the work as a means of making a quick profit? That is almost certainly nor what an artist has in mind when making a painting or sculpture, and it is not what most people think art is for. But if the work itself is not endangered or made less available for study and enjoyment, what is the harm?

Mr Hughes seems to be saying something different: that when a great work of art commands a high price, the viewer's perception of the work is distorted. Instead of a pure aesthetic experience, what the viewer receives is affected by awareness that the painting brought a record price at auction. The market information is treated as 'noise', as extraneous data that adulterate the aesthetic experience? But why should awareness that a painting brought a certain price at auction be a less legitimate part of what the viewer brings to it than awareness that the painter died young or that the work was commissioned by a historically famous patron, or that it was taken by Napoleon during his Italian campaign or that it was badly torn when it was rehung at the Louvre and has been skillfully repaired? The work has a history. Everything that is known about it affects the viewer's perception of it. There is no pure aesthetic experience, no immaculate perception.

A third, more interesting possibility is that the commodification charge is based on the belief that market values diverge sharply from art-historical or aesthetic values, and that a public eagerly informed of prices by the media is too easily misled into supposing that the market price equates with the work's true value, that expensive art equals good art. This proposition raises interesting and ultimately profound questions about the nature of art and about how artistic value, as distinguished from market value, is established. Bur at the immediate operational level, the nearest thing to 'true' artistic value is determined by an art-world consensus, a convergence of opinion among art historians, critics, connoisseurs, museum professionals and knowledgeable collectors and dealers.

This consensus seldom agrees entirely with the market because both the art world and the market have access to imperfect information, both are subject to the vagaries of human behaviour, and neither is entirely immune from fads and trends. But the variance between them is seldom great and will usually be readily explainable. Someone may pay too much for an uninteresting Renoir because of the artist's name, out of ignorance about the uneven quality of his works. Media hype and too much wine at dinner may lead a wealthy collector to overbid for a work at auction (but there must have been an underbidder). Successful marketing by a skillful dealer may stimulate the demand for works by an artist with a gimmick. But the art world consensus sets limits on the possible range and duration of such variations between market price and quality, it only because the art market operates within the art world and is part of it. Normally there is a close relation between art world consensus about artistic value and market value. When opinion about artistic value changes over time, market performance changes with it.

Socialists and other ideological opponents of market capitalism may have a principled basis for condemning the art market. But for the rest of us, the commodification objection expresses little more than an effete prejudice: it denigrates dealers and collectors as investors and speculators who contribute to the impairment of unspecified artistic values. Even museums, when they sell off works from their collections, become soulless commodifiers. Contact with the market soils the work of art, and participation in the market soils the participant (although artists who sell their works somehow remain unsullied). The people who invest their time, talent and money in activities that make and maintain the market for works of art and help to build important private and museum collections are demonised, made into enemies of Art. Such an attitude does not deserve to be taken seriously by serious people.

The prejudice against commerce in works of art has taken legal form in the work of UNESCO, whose 1976 Recommendation concerning the international exchange of cultural property, while supporting the international exchange of cultural property, opposed international trade, stating that:

   the international circulation of cultural property is still largely
   dependent on the activities of self-seeking parties and so tends to
   lead to speculation which causes the price of such property to
   rise, making it inaccessible to poorer countries and institutions
   while at the same time encouraging the spread of illicit trading.

This statement refers, with evident disapproval, to buyers and sellers engaged in market transactions as 'self-seeking parties'. The normal human tendency to base present action on assumptions about the future is condemned as "speculation'. By this logic an artist who decides not to sell a painting now because he expects that it may become more valuable in the future is a 'speculator'. The assumption that speculation 'causes' the prices of works of art and other cultural objects to rise is naive. Constricting the licit supply of cultural objects by prohibiting their export is far more likely to cause prices to rise and to encourage the spread of illicit trading than would 'speculation' by museums, collectors, dealers and auction houses trading in a licit market.

As to 'poorer countries', many of which are source nations, the orderly marketing of surplus cultural objects could pro tanto displace the black market while providing a significant source of income to the source nation and its citizens. That major source nations hold large stocks of marketable surplus objects is widely known and is confirmed by another paragraph in the Recommendation's Preamble:

   Many cultural institutions, whatever their financial resources,
   possess several identical or similar specimens of cultural
   objects of indisputable quality and origin which are amply
   documented, and ... some of these items, which are of only
   minor or secondary importance for these restitutions because of
   their plurality, would be welcomed as valuable accessions by
   institutions in other countries.

Such objects would also be welcomed to the international market by museums, collectors and the art trade. The Recommendation, however, consistent in its distaste for the market, approves only rater-institutional (government to government and museum to museum) exchanges. In fact, the Recommendation contemplates a cultural property world that is populated solely by governments and 'institutions'. There is no place in it for private collectors or an active art trade and no scope for a licit market. There is no recognition of the pivotal roles of collectors, dealers and auction houses in supporting artists and promoting their work; in building great private collections that ultimately enrich museums; in pioneering the collection of antiquities, experimental art works, and other objects that eventually are recognised for their cultural importance.

UNESCO's anti-market bias has recently grown even stronger. Article 2(7) of the 2001 UNESCO Convention on Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage states in its entirety that: 'Underwater cultural heritage shall not be commercially exploited'. This breath-taking provision is elucidated in the Rules annexed to the Convention:

   The commercial exploitation of underwater cultural heritage for
   trade or speculation or its irretrievable dispersal is
   fundamentally incompatible with the protection and proper
   management of underwater cultural heritage. Underwater cultural
   heritage shall not be traded, sold, bought or bartered as
   commercial goods.

In this Rule we arrive at a ridiculous extreme. Here is a legal provision that any thinking person realizes will induce a black market. The private search for underwater archaeological sites will continue but will too often be unlicensed, surreptitious, hasty, unprofessional and undocumented. Artifacts, contexts and irreplaceable information about the human past will be lost. Transactions will be secret and unrecorded and the objects traded will become anonymous orphans.

A number of forces have converged to produce this unfortunate bit of international legislation. The effete prejudice against commodification is only one, and probably the least, of them. Still ...

(1) 'Goya Portrait to go Back to Spain', New York Times, 11 April 1986, at column 30

(2) See Hughes's 1984 essay 'Ant and Money', in Robert Hughes Nothing if Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists, New York, 1990

Professor John Henry Merryman is Sweitzer Professor of Law and Cooperating Professor of Art, Emeritus, at Stanford University, where he teaches Comparative Law and Art Law. He was a member of the UNIDROIT Working Group that produced the preliminary draft UNIDROIT Convention, was an organiser and first President of the International Cultural Property Society, and co-founded the International Journal of Cultural Property. He has recently published 'A licit international trade in cultural objects', in Art Market Matters (The European Fine Art Foundation, available from www.tefaf.com).

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