Art as Commodity

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 12 October 2021

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today's art world is driven by multimillion-dollar auctions and fancy art fairs inaccessible to most Americans — Art Basel Miami, anyone? Those who do view art spend an average of just eight seconds per work, so it's not clear that we're even meaningfully experiencing those Monet water lilies. In episode 36, Ellie and David explore the way capitalism has turned art into a commodity. From Basquiat to Banksy, even street art seems to have been devoured by capitalism’s endless hunger for monetary exchange, selling aesthetics of revolution for millions of dollars at auction. How might intricate Tibetan sand paintings and even macaroni necklaces help us envision a future for art outside of commodification?

Works Discussed

John Dewey, Art as Experience
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art
Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry
Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience
Diana Crane, “Reflections on the Global Art Market”
Cynthia Freeland, What is Art?
McKenzie Wark, “Digital Provenance and the Artwork as Derivative”
Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting
Banksy, Love is in the Bin
Karl Marx, 1844 Manuscripts
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Pont Neuf Wrapped

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm David Pena Guzman.
0:08.6	And I'm Ellie Anderson.
0:10.2	Welcome to Overthink.
0:12.0	The podcast where two friends, who are also professors, put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.
0:18.6	Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.
0:30.4	In 2018, a Banksy painting sold for $1.4 million at a Sotheby's auction.
0:41.1	But right after it was sold, it immediately lowered itself through a shredder that was built into the bottom of the frame. And of course,
0:46.2	this went viral immediately. Yeah. I mean, just imagine spending a million and a half dollars on a painting only to have it immediately destroy itself.
0:57.9	I have to wonder here, like, maybe Banksy realized how ugly it was.
1:03.9	It was that girl with balloon painting that they're so known for.
1:07.7	Well, no, I don't think it's that.
1:09.6	But also, it's important to know that it only shredded
1:12.3	halfway because the mechanism stopped working halfway. So it was supposed to shred the painting
1:18.5	entirely, but it only shredded about half, and then it stopped. Oh my God. I didn't know that.
1:25.1	I feel like the headline was just like shredded painting by Banksy at Sotheby's or something like that.
1:30.7	But that's almost even better because now you have half of an ugly painting and half of an ugly shredded painting.
1:38.0	Sorry to the Banksy fans out there.
1:39.5	Maybe I'm like alienating folks just right off the bat with my disdain for Banksy's Girl with a Balloon. Oh my God. Is it just Girl with a Balloon or Old Banksy? I don't feel like I know Banksy's of well enough to make that statement, but I would say I have a generally negative impression of Banksy. How about you? I don't dislike him, but I also don't love him. Either way, I think maybe the seller of the painting will agree with
2:01.4	you that it was just an ugly shredded painting, who knows? But the weird thing is that this
2:07.4	half-shredded painting is now expected to go for between $5 and $8 million. And Sotheby's has claimed that
2:17.3	it was the first artwork in history to be
2:21.2	created live during an auction. So they're trying to put a positive spin on it by claiming
	...

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