Art today is trapped in an unbearable paradox: the more a work sells for stratospheric heights, the more it risks losing what made it its true value. As Walter Benjamin already pointed out, the “aura” of art, this inalienable dimension linked to its uniqueness and its intimate experience, dissolves as soon as the work enters into the game of commercial exchanges. The artist becomes a merchant, and aesthetics, a consumer product. A trend exacerbated in the era of conceptual art and digital technologies.
When art loses its soul: the tyranny of the market
Marcel Duchamp, by exhibiting a urinal as a work of art in 1917, intended to challenge academic conventions with this ready-made. A hundred years later, this spirit of subversion seems to have been turned against itself. The auction records broken each year at Christies, Sothebies, Phillips and Artcurial illustrate less artistic recognition than a phenomenon of financial speculation. As Pierre Bourdieu already explained in The Rules of Art, the autonomy of the artistic field is constantly threatened by economic and social pressures.
Art, from crafts to the cultural industry
Art today has emerged from craftsmanship and transformed into a cultural industry. An industry of major exhibitions and major international fairs dominated by Art Basel and the international auction houses already mentioned. But art is also becoming dematerialized under the effects of technology.
The era of NFTs: the work as a financial asset
Today, NFTs, Non-Fungible Tokens, push this logic to its climax: the work no longer exists except as a financial asset, disembodied from any sensory or cultural experience. In 2021, an NFT by the artist Beeple sold at Christie’s for $69 million, a price justified not by its aesthetic value, but by its artificial scarcity.
-A return to basics?
Faced with this commodification, certain initiatives seek to redefine the place of art. Thus, the “Art for Art’s Sake” movement promotes creation freed from economic logic. But can we really escape the market? Museums themselves depend more and more on sponsors and donors, linked to financial logics.
Art without price or value?
So, is art condemned to oscillate between commercial sacralization and cultural devaluation? One thing is certain: what is priceless cannot be measured, but perhaps this is the true freedom of art. As Oscar Wilde said, “A cynic knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.” At a time of widespread financialization, how can we assess the true value of what cannot have a price?
Appendices: Sources and references
1. Benjamin, Walter. The work of art at the time of its technical reproducibility, 1936.
2. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art, Seuil editions, 1992.
3. Adorno, Theodor W., and Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of reason, Gallimard editions, 1944.
4. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890.
5. “Salvator Mundi” auction details, Christie’s, 2017.
6. Beeple NFT sale, Christie’s, 2021.
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