A gilded trinket for the speculative investor; doesn’t hurt that it’s easy on the eye – and everything else as well. Of course people are entitled to spend money however they see fit, and maybe it was love at first sight with this (inescapably minor) work, but the pernicious assumption that its price is somehow a measure of what the photographer has achieved is one that undermines the potential of the medium as a whole – perhaps it is better to be outside the Academy than smothered by it, because if we accept that “art” inheres in that class of objects designated as art, then we are bound to an unnecessarily limited view of what it can be, at best a set of object relations and their effect – little more than the stuff of art, and whatever someone is willing to pay for it.
The commodity value of an artwork depends on any number of factors, but not at all on its discursive potential, the ability something has to acquire meaning apart from its status as an object – art exists in the scope of that discourse for which the artwork is merely a catalyst. Ideas and aesthetic experiences don’t come with prices tags, or at least they shouldn’t, because art has nothing to do with its institutions and less still to do with any sense of terminal anxiety about what art is besides a good investment for the obscenely rich, no more significant than last season’s designer handbags. If Gursky is to be remembered it will be because the best of what he achieved was able to make visible a particular cultural moment, and indeed the nearly unique way in which he was seen to embody something of that in his work – what his prints sell for at auction is perhaps not incidental to his status as an artist, but it is certainly not a meaningful index of what his work is about or how it will be seen in the future.
The bond between art and wealth is an historical fact, but it need not be an inevitability.
For some artworks comparative rarity determines their price; a painting is a unique object, the product of intense labour that requires both an overall vision and daily commitment. That fact alone is enough to make a painting the object of speculative interest, at least when it is the work of an artist who is clearly sanctified by the market – in other words, a safe bet. Those anti-establishment practices that were supposed to obliterate the stranglehold of economic forces in the distribution of art have now safely entered the cannon. Installations and video routinely sell at auction for prices much the same as those achieved by painting or sculpture and if a mere photograph can be sold for as much then it surely is as important.
All of which is not to suggest of course that an artist should not be paid for their work or that it doesn’t have some monetary worth, but rather that the value of art is – maybe somewhat paradoxically – unrelated to the work itself. Meaning is not for sale.
