Post ArtFair Thoughts: The Difference between Priceless Art and the Commodification of Art into a Buyable Brand

Commodification 101: Haring Chocolat at Le Bon Marché

I was working at Toronto Art, an art fair, last week and was reminded - yet again - the uneasiness that emerges whenever art and monetary worth start mingling. As if the price of artistic objects was either intrinsically random or totally unable to capture its 'auratic' value.

But while the worth of art is an uneasy business for some art fair visitors, mass consumption culture has very good at making sure art's aura would be made (more) accessible and (very much) acceptably buyable.

In an article entitled "Consuming Caravaggio" (2006) Kent Drummond traces the migration of Caravaggio’s art from a small elite's secret to mass market knowledge. In order to develop how the public-at-large has come to know Caravaggio and experience the Caravaggio brand he divides the process into three ‘portals:’ the ‘appropriation’ of the artistic work by a limited group (like the Damien Hirst sale); the ‘commercialization’ of the oeuvre in which promotion and distribution activities broaden the scale of the audience and “lower its symbolic capital” (think the Basquiat movie or blockbuster MoMA exhibitions) and finally the ‘commodification’ portal which, with greater advertising, graphics and fashion engenders Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra and idea that the 'image is all'.

Indeed in his book Simulations (1983) Baudrillard sums up the idea of commodification as “the creation and consumption of a system of objects by which the consumer can define him/herself at a profoundly superficial level. Here one doesn’t buy a t-shirt; one lives the lifestyle.” The process is the epiphany of “hyper-reality:” when ‘real’ identities are fully based on referents that have been totally dissolved in the mechanisms of capitalism.

Recently Montreal's Ogilvy's windows displayed Otto Dix reproductions with its fall mannequins. Slightly awkward this example of commodification is simultaneously an attempt to promote a slightly obscure artist's show in a museum that needs coolness and a fancy commercial department store trying to align its own products with those coined art. Dix's ideas are diluted, as his work is used for its aura - or lifestyle it is associated to (cultured wealthy bourgeois) - more than anything else. 

Commodification 102: Otto Dix is Fall Fashion at Montreal's Ogilvy's

I think the uneasiness of having an event dedicated to the pricing of art lies in that art supposedly implies the viewer/consumer questions the objects' value, aesthetic, discourse, aura, whereas brands and stores will never invite one to ask questions - either buy or don't, either own or don't, either identify or don't. With art there is a precarious midway: art invites to stand, look, wait, ponder, judge, attempt to understand.  And this flux state engendered by a supposedly priceless object (an art object) can only have a socially acceptable price tag when it has been transformed/commodified, or in Baudrillard's terms liquidated of meaning, when it takes the form of a chocolate box or background for mannequins wearing Fall's styles. 

Quotes: Smith, Terry. “Production.” Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff ed. Critical Terms for Art History, Second Edition. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2003. 376