Critical Terms for

Art History Edited by

Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London

TWENTY-ONE

Value

Joseph Leo Koerner and Lisbet Koerner

Value would seem to be the most critical of terms. It is that which criticism, as an act of judgment or evaluation, decides about its object: whether, or to what degree, the object is true or right or beautiful. At its founding in the seventeenth century, the modern criticism of art took as its task evaluating works through a separation, or krisis) of the beautiful from the ugly by means of the faculty of taste. Interestingly, although taste was deemed to be more subjective than reason, the very activity of submitting an object to free critique, to a judgment whose rules were unaffected by beliefs in an absolute, was the legacy that art criticism bequeathed to philosophy. Indeed because of its dis­tance from practical life, art-and with it the cultivated criticism of its value­opened up the possibility of those more subversive critiques of absolute values (Church, State, Law, and even Reason itself) that constituted the European Enlightenment.

The modern age was, as the critical philosopher Immanuel Kant put it in 1780, "in especial degree the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit." And criticism, the "test of free and open examination," began with the study of art. It first found its voice in the so-called quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, waged in the French academies in the late seven­teenth century, in which the absolute value of tradition was contested by the different, and therefore relative, value of the present.

Yet at the same time as value judgments are criticism's goal, value and judg­ment themselves are-and were from the start-the troubled objects of criti­cism. Even as it submitted "everything" to critique, human judgment was itself open to critique. Indeed, within the critical tradition inaugurated by Kant, judgment was deemed the origin of those values it appeared to adjudicate. And once again, it was the criticism of art that framed this inversion. For what taste demonstrated most dearly was that the source of value lay not in the judged object but in the judging subject. Discussions specifically about art's value thus occupy a privileged place within modern thought about value generally, and it is this philosophical tradition that we shall first review before turning, in parts II and III, to specific economic and critical theories of value in art.

I

Modern aesthetics began as a science of subjective criticism, of an evaluation of the object not as it is) but as it is for us. Voltaire's definition of beauty in the Philosophical Dictionary (1764) expresses nicely this essential relativity of the

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aesthetic by imagining the beautiful from a perspective radically dissociated from "us:" "Ask a toad what is beauty, the Beautiful, to kalon) and he will answer that it is his she-toad." In this variation on the antique argument about the anthropomorphism of the gods, aesthetic evaluations bear the image of the critic (as Voltaire himself betrays when he presupposes judges to be male and the judged to be female). Thus the obviously subjective character of the values particular to art gave art a new centrality during the age of criticism, as the privileged instance of the subjectivity of all values, whether religious, political, or ethical.

It is this self-critical legacy of the term ''value'' that is dominant in contempo­rary art history. To speak of value today is rarely to reach a judgment on the beauty of an art object. Such evaluations, held to be mere relative judgments of values that are themselves relative, have been largely purged from academic practice and annexed to the journalistic practices of "art criticism." Or they have become part of the discipline's self-policing activities, where they thrive within judgments reached not about artists, but about other art historians (in book reviews, recommendation letters, and pedagogy). Value, as a critical term today, functions instead to submit to a higher court those judgments which­erroneously-propose themselves as objective statements about the artwork. It functions to expose such judgments as projections of the evaluating subject and to ask how, given their relativity, they acquire authority.

And of all the values which contemporary art history renders relative, the most central is that of art itself. Art, it is discovered, is not a quality of the object, but a valuation by the subject; like beauty, art is in the eyes of the beholder. This verdict is commonly reached against what is postulated as the "common" opinion (or superstition) which would hold that aesthetic value is an inherent property of objects and a kind of ineffable thing. The history of aesthetics, however, reveals how rarely such an opinion was ever current. Since for centuries the commonplace had been that de gustibus non est disputandum (there is no disputing concerning matters of taste), it would seem that the critical debate over value in art remains stalled at its shadowy origins in the baroque quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. More specifically, in the absence of any seriously held modern aesthetic absolutes, historians of art today forget that their critical position is not only old, but also normative within the aesthetic tradition that we seek to overturn. For, to reiterate, since the Enlightenment it has been art's founding task to submit all absolute values to critical judgment.

The central modern problem for the study of value in art, then, has been neither the invention and maintenance of universal norms, nor the relativization of such norms through critique, but rather the investigation of how, in spite of our "common" expectation of the radical subjectivity of taste, there exists any consensus about the "greatness" of certain works of art. The most sober and compelling account of the social and institutional conditions of aesthetic

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consensus is that of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Writing against what he terms "the religion of art," Bourdieu sets out to discover the essentially social function of art. It might seem, he argues, that the experience of art, and the values that derive from that experience, are available to all people equally and individually, in, say, the "public" museum, and, further, that good taste is innate (a sort of secular state of grace) . In reality, however, aesthetic experience is a learned disposition, and therefore an inherited privilege mediated by the institu­tions of family and school. Art's value in modern society, Bourdieu argues, derives from this play between private subjectivity and social reality. Value seems to be a judgment made freely by the individual in his or her irreducible subjectivity, and good taste appears therefore to be a natural proclivity. In fact) these are ways of maintaining social distinctions by masking the real privileges that enable judgments in the first place. Here we encounter one "objective" approach to the subjective value of art, for it discerns in the realm of the aesthetic, and in the value of privacy and subjectivity cultivated there, the social negotiation of power. Since the late 1960s, this critique of taste has been ex­tended beyond Bourdieu's emphasis on class to dismantle other socially repro­duced "distinctions" such as race, gender, and ethnicity.

In his ironizing treatment of the art lover as last true believer in predestina­tion, and in his controlling analogy of art and religion, Bourdieu links back, via Karl Marx's attack on religion as "opiate of the people," to the Enlighten­ment critique of all prejudices and superstitions. Yet in his insistence that judg­ments of taste are the inherited markers of social class, Bourdieu is also heir to Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued in the Genealogy of Morals (1887) that the logical distinctions between true and false, as well as ethical ones between good and evil, are in the end distinctions of taste, which are themselves the results of "genealogy," the consequences, that is, of high and low birth. The foundation of values in aesthetics, and the grounding, in turn, of aesthetics in class, leads Nietzsche not to a sociology of art, however, but to the contrary: an aesthetiza­tion of the social. His philosophy, a self-proclaimed "reevaluation of all values" that took as one of its guiding aphorisms that "there are no states of fact as such" but "only interpretations," aspires to be a new form of art. For Nietzsche believed that only art, the most subjective of values, can express the concealed subjectivity of all values. This had also been the position of the early German romantics who, at ca. 1800, argued that the highest form of philosophy was art criticism and that the highest form of art criticism was the artwork.

Here is proclaimed the "religion of art" Bourdieu so detests, where the singularity of the aesthetic object replaces monotheism's God. Yet at its found­ing, modern aestheticism did not celebrate art as an absolute value, but rather as the fullest consequence of absolute value's historical impossibility. Modern art

or, more precisely, art produced as emblematic of modernity, as "avant-garde," declared its own value to be precisely the revaluation of value. It might seem today that the moment of "modern" art is over, with its celebration of the

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redemptive power of the aesthetic, and that the discipline of art history, so skeptical of aesthetics, now studies this moment as fully past. Yet it is often where art history is at its most self-critical, and where avant-garde theories of value abound, that the primacy of the aesthetic over the logical, and of the rhetorical over the scientific, is most vigorously maintained. For the contempo­rary critical study of art serves largely to criticize the belief (which it labels as traditional, common, or unexamined) that art has intrinsic value unrelated to the concrete material circumstances of its production and consumption. Yet art's value for the modern period has always consisted in its exemplary relativity, its ability to express, in concrete terms, that which is most subjective within the subject.

Luc Ferry has recently placed the emergent disciplines of aesthetics and art history within the broader history of Western individualism. Modern philoso­phy, he argues, arose out of a search for certainty and culminated in radical relativism. It began with Descartes, who in 1637, in his search for legitimate criteria for knowledge, rejected tradition as prejudiced and embraced the think­ing subject or cogito as truth's sole judge. And it ended with Nietzsche, who unmasked the subject as a fabulist of truths, rather than as judge of Truth, and who splintered the world into infinite individual perspectives. Modern aesthet­ics began where philosophy seemed to conclude.

One century before Nietzsche's revaluation of values, aesthetics arose from the assumption that its object, beauty, is a subjective judgment, and then it went about seeking criteria that might nonetheless hold. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten'sAesthetica (1750), which invented the discipline, took as its topic the subjective sense-impression of beauty, rather than the actual beautiful thing. Beauty thus became neither an objective attribute, nor the object'S relation to a transcendental idea, but instead the bodily feeling of pleasure occurring within the sensing subject. The full implication of aesthetics as a science of subjective judgments was then explored by Kant, who traced the objects of knowledge back to the conditions and character of the knowing subject. Kant's aesthetics, developed in his Critique of Judgment (1790), functioned to bridge the gap between subject and object that his theories of knowledge and of ethics had opened up. It is in the things called art, Kant argued, that the subject confronts objects with a wholly "disinterested satisfaction," at equilibrium, that is, with the world. Art, whose patently subjective determination had hitherto rendered it marginal to philosophy, now stood at philosophy's center, offering the miss­ing link in the great divides between self and world, ethics and reason, the individual and the collective.

Herein lies the theoretical foundation of the value of art as it legitimized the emergent modern disciplines of the humanities. By virtue of its irreducible subjectivity, art, according to a reception of Kantian aesthetics which became normative for the humanities, functioned to reveal to the subject his or her proper image (in German, Bild) as subject. Art was also valuable because its

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power to form or to imagine (hilden) benefited humanity by showing a people its ideal image and end. The value of art to elevate and form individuals' capaci­ties (a process called Bildung) may sound today like a traditionalist plea for "high" art, and therefore like the mechanism by which privileges are maintained by appearing (falsely) to be the property of "all" humanity. Yet at its beginning, Bildung consisted in its holding up to the individual an image of the conditions of his or her subjectivity, which meant displaying to the subject the subjectivity of an other. Indeed the value of "disinterested satisfaction" was that it allowed people to distance themselves from their private interests and purposes, and to look at these the way another would see them.

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It may be that, in the nineteenth century, Bildung defined a new class of "men of taste," whose status derived not directly or only from birth, but also from their performance in the schools that trained them and in the bureaucracies that employed them. One could study the conditions of this new "meritocracy." For example, their proper valuation of art could offer upward mobility only if there existed social and institutional frameworks (e.g., learned journals and civil service examinations) which publicized and judged such valuations-conditions that still underlie the university insofar as it claims to educate (hilden) a free citizenry. Yet within the ideal ofBildung) art's value for forming subjects derives from the artwork's status as unique object, and therefore as a radical otherness perfectly matching the subject's individuality. This otherness may be attributed to the singularity of artistic "genius." Or it may result from the artwork's having been made for another place and time. What it occasions, above all, is a recogni­tion of art's history) a consciousness that past artworks not only look different from works of the present, and call for other criteria, but that they were also beheld differently in their past, and that their values, like all values, are histori­cally specific. For according to the philosopher F. G. W. Hegel, in his Lectures on Aesthetics delivered in the 1820s, Bildung occurs in the encounter with oth­erness, and, in particular, with the otherness of the art of the past.

It has long been understood that taste has a history. The difference between the awareness of changing fashions and the modern historical understanding of aesthetic values lies in the way change becomes proof both of the specificity of an age or culture (as in J. G. Herder and Montesquieu) and of the value equivalence between different ages and peoples (as in Leopold Ranke's histori­cism). Today's art historians continue to specify the history of taste when they trace art's reception over time. Reception history-the story of past art's critical passage to the present-,-documents how aesthetic value depends on the wider culture that "receives" it. And the study of period aesthetics, of the way different cultures understood art differently, has heightened the awareness that there are no eternal values (Michael Baxandall has pioneered this approach for the Italian Renaissance). For example, whereas the Middle Ages valued precious materials

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more than exceptional artistry, the Renaissance began to champion craftsman­ship. In 1435 Leon Battista Alberti even stated that the painted simulation gold was better than real gold. And in the modern period, craftsmanship became eclipsed by the value of artistic genius, which, because of its historical rarity, was believed to make the chance stroke of a pen more valuable than either gold or golden illusions. Of course, this neat historical scheme fits only for some areas of culture. Even in the Renaissance, objects of expensive materials were priced higher than great paintings; and today the mass-marketing of collectibles (e.g., products of the Franklin Mint) continues to appeal to a faith in material value by advertising in the object the presence of gold, pewter, leather, oak, etc.

In this century, the concrete history of value has even historicized the histori­cism of Bildung. The ideal of Bildung assumed that, however different the past is from the present, its value both then as now lies in its being experienced by the subject. Historians of premodern literature, such as E. R. Curtius and Erich Auerbach, as well as materialist historians of art, such as Baxandall, have uncovered radical differences in the social and perceptual uses of art. Within these concrete histories, the Middle Ages becomes the quintessentially other past. For the Renaissance, antiquity had been the privileged historical culture. Yet even as it differed from the present, and even more so from the immediate past (those ages mere "middle" and rejected as "dark" by the Renaissance), antiquity's value was as a timeless norm set against the vagaries of fashion and the threat of decline. At around 1800, the new taste for medieval art effected a different historical consciousness. The Middle Ages were valued not as time­less, but as a time of different values, as a period which, by its grotesque departure from normative aesthetics, evidenced the historicity of value.

The otherness of the Middle Ages supported modern art's break with the past, as well as the romantic cult of originality, which universalized difference itself as the index of value. And it proved that each epoch defines art differently, demanding that values be explained historically. Reconstructing the local histo­ries of "art in context" thus became one of the first tasks of the nascent discipline of art history as it emerged in the nineteenth century.

Both the "religion of art" and its critique thus had roots in the romantic reception of the Middle Ages. Art was sacralized as the response to a dual awareness that the sacred, which was believed to have dwelt with humanity during the medieval "age of faith," had withdrawn during the "age of reason," and that "art itself," as Hegel wrote in the Aesthetics) "considered in its highest vocation is and remains for us a thing of the past." The historical study of art, which brackets judgments of value and avoids analyzing contemporary art,

begins by confronting the pastness of both value-certainty and "true" art. Hence­forth, art's value is constructed nostalgically, in innumerable antimodernisms which, as Nietzsche does, tap the artwork with "a hammer" and hear the "fa­mous hollow sound" of the idol.

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Even a critic as radical as Walter Benjamin works within such a nostalgia. In his essay ''The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), Benjamin argued that the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern period meant, for art, a dwindling of its value. The medieval cult image, alway.s singular and tied to one time and place, possessed a power or "aura" lacking in the modern art object which, through printing and photography, is infinitely repro­ducible. Modernity, effecting art direcdy through new production technologies, reveals (so Benjamin argued) its bankruptcy through the hollowness of its im­ages. The ability to see through the aesthetic value of the present thus seems to engender an idealization of a vanquished past. The rehabilitation of the Middle Ages, which founded art history's relativizing stance towards aesthetic value, at the same time established the value of history itself. By 1903 the great Viennese art historian Alois Riegl, in his essay on "The Modern Cult of Monuments," could place aesthetic value outside his purview and treat only age value and historical value.

II

Of course, there exist approaches to the value of art that are free of nostalgia. If one were to want to analyze the value of art on wholly relative grounds, there exists an entire discipline that has value-relativity as its basis, namely neoclassical economics. For contemporary economics understands that individ­ual human intentions and beliefs are largely unavailable to systematic analysis; it therefore leaves these unstudied-"black-boxes" them, as it were-defining value as exchange quantified in price. An economics of art thus would not explain the value a culture accords to art as such. Rather it would classify art objects (alongside other valuables like gold coins and tulip bulbs) as both mone­tary instruments and commodities. Nor would the economics of art easily ex­plain differences in the value among art objects, or historical shifts in taste (e.g., why the 1920s bought rococo art, while the 1980s cared for impressionism). Instead, an economics of art would investigate the structure and periodization of art markets, the economic properties peculiar to artworks, and the role of state powers in determining supply and demand. And it would study the net­works of dependencies among the agents which evaluate art: auction houses, dealers, museums public and private, artists, art schools, collectors, critics, and art historians.

In an economics of art, liquidity of capital would be a key variable. For the premodern period, wealth is largely in the form of land, which is largely illiquid. When in 1754 the king of Saxony bought Raphael's Sistine Madilnna for about £8,500 (about $280,000 in 1994 U.S. dollars), this was the highest price ever paid for an art object in the West. The art frenzy of the 1770s, 1920s, and 1980s, by contrast, were correlated to "new money" (from sugar, oil, and finance) which occasioned inflated prices for top-end unica such as art objects and antiques.

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An economics of art would measure the availability of art objects, as well. Again this is largely a function of modernity, when on an unprecedented scale individual artworks were pried loose from their hereditary surrounds: for exam­ple, the French Revolution's looting of noble property and Napoleon's secular­ization of church property and confiscation of works of arts as war indemnity­most famously from the pope in 1796. In England, one key event was the Settled Lands Act ( 1882). To help an aristocracy rich in assets and short of cash, the act allowed the sale of entailed chattel (provided that proceeds went into trust). Led by the Duke of Marlborough, the British aristocracy began alienating heirlooms to-as The Times put it in 1884-"the Rothschilds, or Vanderbilt. "

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An economics of art would also study the establishment of sales channels such as auction houses (e.g., Christie's in 1766), alongside the rise of public art institutions, such as the Louvre ( 1793) and the Metropolitan Museum (1870). For museums support the value of a marketed art object by reverentially dis­playing its "priceless" twins, rather like the gold once held in public trust against paper currency. Moreover, as art objects pass into the museum, the numbers available for private purchase decrease. As location theory in economics pre­dicts, these "flagship" organizations also become nuclei for geographic cluster­ing of art production and consumption-e.g., the postwar New York "art scene" with its mutually supportive, because competitive, network of producers, consumers, agents, and banks (i.e., museums).

An economics of art would also study the economic peculiarities of the art

object itself: a consumer durable not depreciated over its lifetime and (excepting works by living artists and by forgers) in shrinking supply. The art collector's faith that art has increasing value translates into inflation-hedge hoarding. The possession of art also implies an elite economy of heirlooms, and it evidences its owner's taste. And this prestige is intrinsic to the purchase. A New York art gallery sells not only an art object, but also an experience-that of belonging to an imaginary commonwealth of connoisseurs. Also, as Thorstein Veblen proved (in The Theory of the Leisure Class) 1899), at the top end of the market the price of an object is itself part of its customer-perceived value.

Finally, an economics of art would have to frame twentieth-century art mar­kets in the context of state powers, such as currency-exchange controls, tariffs, and criminal law. Since the reporting duties of art dealers lag behind those of financial institutions, art objects are vehicles for money laundering (i.e., the transfer of criminal profit into the formal sector). A more central variable, however, is tax law. In postwar Europe, Japan, and the U.S., death duties for the wealthy range from about 50 percent to over 100 percent of the total estate. Art objects, however, are commonly taxed differently at death (their price being decided, according to some tax laws, by the estate itself). The boom in impres-

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sionist art in Japan in the 1980s, so often explained in cultural terms as an exotic potlatch, was driven partly by the way artworks were exempt from certain death duties (Japanese corporate tax laws played a role, as well). Art can also be donated to a public institution in lieu of tax payments, which helps explain the transfer of art into the public realm. An economics of art would thus draw forth a central irony of the twentieth-century history of art's value. For among private collectors, art is typically celebrated as priceless, that is, as part of a family lifeworld opposed to the commercial and contractual nets of obligation cast across ordinary society. Yet the family artwork, passed down the genera­tions'

and acquiring the aura of an heirloom (token of love and loss), is also again made, through the mechanism of death duties, commercial.

Neoclassical economics black-boxes human intentions and beliefs by assum­ing that people are autonomous, self-interested maximizers of utility. Value is thus equated to price. Cultural anthropology in turn opens that black box and encounters a person's or a culture's own narrative of meaning (what Clifford Geertz calls "thick description"). Value is thus taken to be a relative and cultur­ally specific category of thought particular to the observed subject. Anthropo­logical studies of marginal or non-Western people often set out to prove there exist no transcultural values for art. Nicholas Thomas's model of "entangled objects," for example, traces how the valuation of things changes as they pass across cultural lines. Thus if an economics of art is a material and mathematical macrotheory of how art objects circulate, an anthropology of arts is a nominalist record of local narratives of that circulation as told by its agents. Cultural anthropology and neoclassical economics thus complement each other. Both are descriptive, enumerative, Baconian sciences, which limit themselves to re­counting their subjects' own notions of value in art (anthropology) or the material effects of those notions (economics).

ill

The present-day discipline of art history makes use of more generalizing ac­counts of the value imputed to art, however. The four dominating influences here, received from the fields of economics, anthropology, linguistics, and psy­chology, respectively, are Karl Marx, Marcel Mauss, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Sigmund Freud. Current critical theories of the art object as a valuable are usually patchworks or bricolages of all four, mediated by a host of revisionists and earlier bricoleuys) until they achieve a quite bewildering complexity. Uniting most such attempts, from Georges Bataille's "general" or "sacrificial" economy to Jean-Fran<;ois Lyotard's "libinal" economy and Jean-Joseph Goux's "sym­bolic" economy, lies the attempt, mounted against neoclassical economics ab­stracting rationalism (which is viewed not as an explanation, but as a symptom of the modem economy), to account for the irrationality of art value without falling into a reactionary aestheticism.

The basic project of explaining culture through a more fundamental econom-

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ics is modeled, of course, on Marx, who, in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy ( 1867), argued for a historically situated, yet universally valid, concept of value in art, which could only fully emerge in a communist utopia, located at the far end of history. This value he located in the work that went into the art object. Work, properly, was the site where "man" realized his true nature in an immediate encounter with the material world, an encounter uncontami­nated by societal exchange relations (that is, commercial production, trade, and a money economy). Thus Marx located the value of an object of art in its particular manner of production. Since he also periodized history according to how goods are produced and circulated, Marx was able to fashion a critique of value for the present, which more broadly took the form of a critique of ideology.

Marx's account turns on the distinction between appearance and reality, a distinction which, in turn, he founded in a notion of value. ''Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic." From the outset, then, Marx assumed that capitalism's cultural forms are categorically false, and this can be discovered in a philosophical reflection on value. "Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products." "Secrets" and "cryptography" are, then, the founding epistemological metaphors for his­torical materialism's herIJ?eneutics of suspicion, which purports to unearth through its critique of capitalism's self-presentation the hidden substrata of its "reality. "

In Capital) Marx argued that within capitalism a man-made object is, from the point of view of its "use value," only "a thing," "a useful thing." Yet from the point of view of its "exchange value," it embodies a quantity of "abstract labor," which he conceptualized as the (quantifiable) work that had gone into its making. Here he attempted to mathematicize Adam Smith's labor theory of value, arguing that since it is possible to exchange commodity X for commodity Y, it follows that X and Y have a common content over and above a money value expressible in price. (The reasons Marx assumed such a common content are complicated, relating to German idealism and to the moral critique of money economies ubiquitous in nineteenth-century German thought.) Marx reified the supposedly common content of commodities as "abstract labor," which he then used to turn the premises of his argument into the conclusion. His analysis of value closes with the statement that for commodities produced within "the differentia specifica of capitalistic production," "abstract labor" is the basis for "exchange value."

Having established his critical labor theory of value, Marx then developed a theory of value specific to art. He argued that bourgeois aesthetics are a half-involuntary, half-deliberate screening technique intended to mystify the true nature of the activities it purports to portray (which is to say, the capitalist mode of production and its extraction of "surplus value" from working-class

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judged by the size of the given gift; and consumption and destruction of goods went "beyond all bounds." Yet even here Mauss discerned "a system of law and economics" as coherent as our own. In keeping with his teacher Emile Dur­kheim's founding assertion that "there are no religions which are false," Mauss extends anthropology's relativistic approach to value into the domain of eco­nOffilCS.

Where Mauss discovers in podatch a form of reason in a seemingly unreason­able economy, Baudrillard exposes the irrationality of the rational market econ­omy by reading it as podatch. If in the economic order accumulation was privileged, in the "order of signs (of culture), it is mastery of expenditure that is decisive." Since commodities function by their being consumed, and since what is consumed is the total system of commodities, modern society is consti­tuted in an ongoing, though veiled, podatch. For Baudrillard, the clearest em­blem of this conflagration of goods as signs is the art auction. There, within a competition of expenditure, pure economic signs (money) are exchanged for

. the pure signs of culture (paintings), proving that even while art's value is fully relative, this "irrational" relativity is what maintains the social order of consumption.

The outlines of Baudrillard's critique are not new. They owe much to Veb­len's theories of sumptuary value and to Bataille, whose Accursed Share ( 1967) proposed a "general economy" of excess, sacrifice, and reckless expenditure which would subsume conventional economic theories of scarcity and use. And it is anticipated by Werner Sombart, who in 1922 traced the origin of mod­ern capitalism to late medieval culture's demand for luxury goods (Richard Goldthwaite's Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy) 1300-1600 [ 1993] is an interesting inflection of this view). What Baudrillard and other semiotic recep­tions of Marx provide for critical art history are the tools, on the one hand, to treat economies as legible signs, and therefore as representations analogous to art and, on the other hand, to treat art objects, alongside all other "things," as having "a social life" (Arjun Appadurai), thereby opening the discipline to the whole of material culture.

Crucial to the economics of the sign's applicability to art value is its account of aesthetic pleasure. Baudrillard, like other French theorists such as Louis Althusser and Julia Kristeva, derives this account largely from psychoanalysis. Freud himself explained art value by the theory of "sublimation," which held that sexual desires are "diverted" from sexual aims towards new ones constitu­tive of culture. However, critical value theory, perhaps because of its Marxist foundations, or perhaps because it rejects sublimation theory's elevated notion of culture, looks instead to Freud's theory of fetishism for its account of aes­thetic pleasure. In Three Essays on Sexuality ( 1905) and the essay "Fetishism" ( 1927), Freud analyzes cases where "the normal sexual object is replaced by-� another which bears some relation to it, but is entirely unsuited to serve the normal sexual aim. . . . Such substitutes are with some justice likened to the fetishes in which savages believe that their gods are embodied."

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Freud's account of the origin of the fetish is a classic instance of psychoana­lytic myth making. The fetish, Freud proposes, "is a penis substitute." And well aware that this definition is a "disappointment" to his reader, he identifies it as "a particular, quite special penis" that was important to childhood but was lost, namely "the woman's (mother's) phallus which the little boy once believed in and does not forego-we know why." The boy cannot countenance the "lost" penis because its absence foretells his castration; he denies its absence by substi­tuting for it something in which his interest had been "held up at a certain point" in the events leading to his discovery: his mother's shoes, stockings, underclothes, etc.

Freud classifies fetishism among the "perversions," defined as deviations from the "normal" sexual aim: the "union of the genitals." Constructed within the little boy's ocular retreat from the mother's genitals to something else, fetishism becomes the master plot for all wishes that do not achieve their end. Since in Freud copulation is banal compared with "perverse" expressions of desire-for example, in intimate life, all play and pleasure around copulation; in psycho­pathological life, the symptoms which are Freud's working material; in cultural life, art, thought, and psychoanalysis itself-fetishism maps the massive detour of most of our pleasures and activities. To explain our culture's overvaluation of art as fetishism is not to criticize it as false, but simply to trace it back to the underlying structures of want, loss, and exchange that, as Georg Simmel argued in The Philosophy of Money ( 1900), establish the idea of "value" as alone commen­surate with that of "being."

The efficacy of fetishism for defining value as a properly critical term for the history of art has more specific grounds than this, however. Both for Marx and for Freud, the fetish is a function of sight. In Marx, commodity fetishism's substitution of objects for subjects occurs in the "eyes" of men, and Marx compares the error to mistaking "the subjective excitation [of light] of our optic nerve" for "the objective form of something outside the eye." In Freud, sexual fetishism originates in the voyeuristic glance of the boy's eye at the absence of the mother's phallus, and the retreat of the eye to the fetish that fills in that absence. The preeminence of the eye in narratives of fetishism suits well a discipline devoted to visual objects. Of course, in its original early modern usage, the term "fetish" or ''fttisso'' named the non-Western Other's valu­ables-or art objects-as idols, or even worse. Marx's critique of commodity fetishism, like Nietzsche's "twilight of the idols," stands both within the En­lightenment critique of religion as "superstition" and within Judeo-Christian iconophobia, which confiates idolatry and wealth in the figure of the Golden Calf. Even fetishism's scandalous past in the language of colonialism works to the advantage of a self-consciously critical art history, for, turning the charge of idolatry and magic back on to Western art, it figures the art historian not as idolater of aesthetic value, but as iconoclast. Fetishism thus defines value as a critical term not for art history, but against it.

In sum, assumptions about value are inescapable in the study of art. Even

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the most iconoclastic histories, which expose as fictive the intrinsic worth of their object, art, presume the value of iconoclasm itself. Art retains its traditional value as the privileged site of cultural critique.

SUGGESTED READINGS Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1986. The Social Lift of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Bataille, Georges. 1991. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy) translated by

Robert Hurley. Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign) translated by

Charles Levin. Baxandall, Michael. 1972. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Benjamin, Walter. 1968c. ''The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste) translated

by Richard Nice. Ferry, Luc. 1993. Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age) trans­

lated by Robert de Loaiza. Freud, Sigmund. 1962. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality) translated and revised by

James Strachey. ---. 1963. "Fetishism," translated by Joan Riviere. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1975. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art) translated by

T. M. Knox. Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of Judgment) translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Lukacs, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics) trans­

lated by Rodney Livingstone. Marx, Karl. [1867a] 1954. Capital) edited by Friedrich Engels, translated by Samuel

Moore and Edward Aveling. Mauss, Marcel. 1966. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies)

translated by Ian Cunnison. Pietz, William. 1985, 1987, 1988. "The Problem of the Fetish." Riegl, AIois. 1982. "The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Origins,"

translated by Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo. Sirnmel, Georg. 1990. The Philosophy of Money) translated by Tom Bottomore, David

Frisby, and Kaethe Mangelberg. Sombart, Werner. 1967. Luxury and Capitalism. Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange) Material Culture) and Colonialism

in the Pacific.

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