VALUE

Stephanie Syjucos counterfeit crochet designer bag project

Week 8, ADAD1002

aims for week 7

Examine the complexities of value

in creative practice. What is
valued? How do we judge how
valuable art and design is?
Locate what you value in your
project and see if that corresponds
with how others value your
project.
Understand different value
systems (economic, cultural,
environmental, medical,
educational etc.) and how art and
design can reveal or generate new
value systems.
See how professional creative
practitioners assess and plan the
value of their projects.

Studio exercise, COFA1002 in 2014.

KYWRDS
value; exchange; economy;
currency; money; market;
morality; use; commodity;
consumer; virtuality;
abstraction; investment;
transferral; desire; perception;
capitalism; capital; relativity;
value system; index;
depreciation; accumulation;
inflation; debt; credit; crisis
Still from Marian Tubbss video work
Vulgar Latin (click to see video!)

Mierle Laderman Ukeles dedicated her practice to an ongoing investigation into the variable value of labour in
art and its institutions.

what is value?
We can think about values in an everyday sense: what we believe or invest in,
whats important to us, what our ethics look like.
We can also think about value in terms of economy, the system(s) by which things
are exchanged and used. Value is a quality that determines by what means and to
what degree one thing can be exchanged for, or is equal to, another. Economic value
is not independently meaningful but becomes meaningful through relationships:
i.e. the price of litre of milk is not intrinsically linked to the substance of milk but is
determined via complex relations between producers, distributors, consumers;
between supply and demand; according to the average grocery costs of a particular
area (with higher or lower real wages, with more or less taxes on food, etc.).
Its often said that the art market is one of the largest unregulated markets in the
world. The value of art is determined by its relevance to institutions, discourses,
histories, legacies. The relative worth of an art object is a fascinating case study in
the flexibility of value. Design, which is far more integrated as a practice with other
institutions and technologies, often has to consider market value in the viability of its
projects. This marks an interesting distinction between contemporary art and design.

What is Capitalism?
Capitalism is a social and economic system in which industry, trade, production, etc. is
privately owned and run for profit. Capital refers to the process by which money is used to
make more money (an investment with an accumulative return).
Capitalism in its modern form can be traced from agrarian labour and economic practices
in England in the 17th century. From this period, the centralisation of economic
systems/trade networks, urbanisation, industrialisation, and international trade markets
advanced capitalism.
Very simply, under capitalism, a small number of people have the capacity to accumulate
wealth (by profiting from other peoples labour) and everyone else sells their labour (by
working) in order to survive. Capitalism continues by finding new ways of generating profit
think about how weird it is that theres a diverse, competitive and booming industry for
bottled water!

A students work from 2015 exploring value.

What is Neoliberalism?
Neoliberalism refers to theory of contemporary capitalism that foregrounds individual liberty and
freedom as the high point of civilization and goes on to argue these principles are best protected and
achieved by an institutional structure made up of strong private property rights, free markets, free trade,
and minimal state intervention. Steven Shaviro writes that neoliberalism is characterised by the
following specific factors:
1. The dominating influence of financial institutions, which facilitate transfers of wealth from
everybody else to the already wealthy (the One Percent or even the top one hundredth of one
percent).
2.The privatisation and commodification of what used to be common or public goods (resources like
water and green space, as well as public services like education, communication, sewage and garbage
disposal, and transportation).
3. The extraction by banks and other large corporations, of a surplus from all social activities: not
only from production (as in the classical Marxist model of capitalism) but from circulation and
consumption as well. Capital accumulation proceeds not only by direct exploitation but also by
rent-seeking, by debt collection, and by outright expropriation (primitive accumulation).
4. The subjection of all aspects of life to the so-called discipline of the market. This is equivalent, in
more traditional Marxist terms, to the real subsumption by capital of all aspects of life: leisure as well
as labour. Even our sleep is now organised in accordance with the imperatives of production and
capital accumulation.
5. The redefinition of human beings as private owners of their own human capital. Each person is
thereby, as Michel Foucault puts it, forced to become an entrepreneur of himself. In such
circumstances, we are continually obliged to market ourselves, to brand ourselves, to maximise the
return on the investment in ourselves. There is never enough: like the Red Queen, we always need to
keep running, just to stay in the same place. Precarity is the fundamental condition of our lives.
(Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit)

Carrot gold from 1002 in 2015.

Devaluation: The KLF & K-Foundation

These flames are slowly incinerating the
excess profits of The KLF, a British
acid-house duo whose music was popular in
the early 1990s.
In 1993, after thinking about how they might
turn a million pounds of their musical
royalties into art, the two musicians (with a
cameraman) took bundles of cash to a small
island off the coast of Scotland and spent the
night burning the money. It was an action
that they later regretted. The pair attempted
to recuperate some artistic credibility (or
re-capitalise?) from the event by trying to
interest London galleries in an exhibition of a
suitcase of ashes recovered from the
firebut without success. They even went
so far as to offer for sale individual frames
from the film taken of the fire.
> What would you do with a million dollars?
Would you use it to make art?
> Or would you try and use art to make a
million dollars?

Packaged Value: The Shit of the Artist

Piero Manzoni was an Italian Conceptual
artist. In 1961 he made a work called Merda
dartista (Shit of the Artist) that he produced
in a limited edition of 90 cans - each signed
and numbered.
The cans were the subjects of great curiosity.
Manzoni - who died at the age of twenty-nine
- had pegged the price of this work with the
price of gold. This meant that each 30 gram
can would have been valued at about $37 at
the time of its making.
One sold recently at auction for $181,000.
It was claimed later that Manzoni had put
plaster, and not shit, into the cans, but this
was disputed by his girlfriend of the time.
X-rays can't reveal what's inside a steel can
but does it really matter? What is a collector
actually paying for?
In 1989 the artist Bernard Bazile exhibited an
opened can of Merda dartista as his own
work at the Centre Georges Pompidou in
Paris, France.
What was inside? Look it up.

The Label: Certified Value

A photo showing a few magnums of Chteau
Lafite-Rothschild (various vintages) that
were part of a half-dozen pack sold at
auction in 2003 for $35,000.
> Think about how the value of each bottle
depends entirely on the printed label that
identifies it.
> What would the wine be worth if the labels
were washed off these bottles? Would it
change the way the wine tasted?
> Would the labelled bottles fetch any money
after theyd been emptied in a drunken
binge?
> Assuming they werent, how do you think
youd feel while tossing them into the
recycling bin the next day?

Counterfeit Value
In America before the Civil War there was nothing stopping a private bank issuing their own
money - all it required was a printing press and a credible design. These banknotes were often
so ephemeral that they decayed into unrecognisable rags of paper. Under such conditions it
became difficult to tell which designs had been made by real banks and which had been issued
by fake ones. People still used and traded them - even those they knew to be counterfeit - but
they often had to be compared against written descriptions in periodicals published specially to
help identify the current value of the hundreds of different designs in circulation.
> Why do we need a central authority to tell us how much money is worth? How might the
internet change this?
> Is there any compelling reason we shouldn't accept counterfeit money?

Intrinsic Value: Georg Honauer

Alchemy was a kind of proto-science that
investigated (in a very speculative fashion)
the relationships between elemental
materials. It was thought that the right
method of processing might be discovered
that would allow the transformation of any
one material into another. The most
spectacular proof of this process was
imagined to be the creation of gold out of
base metal.
This woodblock print shows the fate of the
alchemist Georg Honauer, who convinced
Duke Friedrich of Wrttemberg that he could,
by his powers of alchemy, convert three and
a half tons of iron into gold.
After he failed in his attempts to do this, the
Duke arranged a spectacular execution in
which Honauer was hanged on gallows
constructed from exactly the same weight of
iron that he had so rashly promised he could
transmute into gold.

Studio Activity #1

Make something related to your

assessment 3 project for no more than $5.
This includes any tools and materials you
use to make the object. The only additional
value you can use is your own or others
labour. You may use found objects, but
nothing that you (or people you know) own.

You will have 1 minute to value add to the

object (explain it). Then it will be sold.

The selling process: Bring $5 in small

change and distribute it to the objects you
deem as most deserving. (You can make
counterfeit money if you like!)

Excess Value
Stephanie Syjuco: Excess Capital (Lowest Bid
Accumulations)
Stephanie Syjuco work interrogates the logic of
economies and empire. In this work, she collects used
editions of Karl Marxs Capital from ebay by making only
one bid. The work is both a document of excess value
and the continued creation of value for this object.
I regularly search Ebay for copies of this title that are up
for auction. I place just one bid. If I am outbid, I don't win.
If I win I am forced to buy it. This works to create an
automatic "demand" for the books and gives me a chance
to accumulate used "Capital." I do not use the "Buy It
Now" feature because that is responding to the seller's
value system and not the market's evaluation of the item.
The idea is that one day the collection can be sold
individually in a vending situation, with the price of each
book being the cost of purchase plus any handling and
shipping fees incurred in the Ebay transaction. The cost
of each book depends on its demand and material
handling. The books vary by being published at different
times and different formats, creating variety within
sameness.

The Value of Artistic Practice #1: Otis Kaye

American trompe l'oeil artists of the 19th century were fascinated by the intricacies of banknote
design and they often painted money in a state of solitary arrest, like an exotic insect fastened
to a collector's wall.
When laws forbidding the representation of Federal currency were enforced in America the
artists found themselves the subject of persecution by the Secret Service.
Otis Kaye made the image shown above, titled D'-JIA-VU? He took up painting after losing a
family fortune in a stock-market crash and throughout his lifetime was prohibited by law to sell
his pictures of money. He gave many of them away to friends and family, although some of his
works are now in the collection of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

The Value of Artistic Practice #2: Andy Warhol

The situation had changed by the time Andy
Warhol screen-printed 200 One Dollar Bills, a
work depicting banknotes crudely rendered and
arranged as a brick-wall on canvas.
In 1987, the artwork was purchased for $385,000
by a collector who eventually turned it to profit
some twenty-five years after the artists death,
when it fetched over $43 million at auction.
> Some artists make lots and others none. Is "art"
something that many people would make if there
was no audience for it?
> Do you think artists regard their practice as an
aristocratic kind of speciality?
> If so, how dependent is it on a special kind of
inequality? On maintaining the distinction
between those who can do things and those who
are content to be observers?
> Warhol suggested it flippantly: but what would
art be (like) if everyone was an artist?
> Everyone suggests it flippantly: but do you think
that artists only become wealthy after they die?

The Value of Labour: artistic labour

Artistic labour is a difficult thing to quantify. It doesnt seem to fit into the simple matrix of supply=demand,
time=money. The value of art is notoriously hard to define and by extension, so is the value of artistic labour.
> How should we fund the arts?
> Should artists be paid a minimum wage?

Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E) is a New York-based activist organization
focused on regulating the payment of artist fees by nonprofit art institutions and establishing a
sustainable labor relation between artists and the institutions that subcontract their labor.

Studio Activity #2
Is a gift ever free? Does every gift carry
the tacit obligation to reciprocate?
In groups or with another class, stage a gift
exchange (or potlatch) using found and/or
basic materials.
You will have to imbue this material or
materials with value by animating,
transforming, re-contextualising, or
re-defining.
Assess what value means outside of a
financial system of exchange. Is a gift
economy possible? When money is removed
from the equation, how is value defined?

Hito Steyerl, Strike, 2010

Strike or shock work is affective labor at insane speeds, enthusiastic, hyperactive, and deeply
compromised
Strike work feeds on exhaustion and tempo, on deadlines and curatorial bullshit, on small talk and fine
print. It also thrives on accelerated exploitation. Id guess thatapart from domestic and care workart
is the industry with the most unpaid labor around. It sustains itself on the time and energy of unpaid
interns and self-exploiting actors on pretty much every level and in almost every function. Free labor and
rampant exploitation are the invisible dark matter that keeps the cultural sector going.

Sol LeWitt: Non-Monetary Exchanges

The conceptual artist Sol LeWitt was famous engaging in non-monetary exchanges. He consistently
traded works not only with high-profile artists like Eva Hesse, Robert Mangold, Paul Ramierez Jonas
(above), and Robert Ryman, but with strangers amateurs and admirers whom he did not know, but
whom had sent their work to him. For LeWitt, the act of exchange seemed to be not only a personal
gesture, but also an integral part of his conceptual practice. In addition to encouraging the circulation of
artworks through a gift economy that challenged the art worlds dominant economic model, LeWitts
exchanges with friends and strangers propose a different way of conceiving of value in general. Resonant
with traditional customs such as potlatch, LeWitts exchanges think outside of monetary systems and
instead foregrounds the idea of reciprocal exchange.

Additional Resources

Stephen Squibb, Genres of Capitalism: Part I,

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/genres-of-capitalism-part-i/
Andrew Hurle (ed), Money, Runway Magazine #25, http://runway.org.au/archive/25-money/
Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), Online Digital Artwork and the Status
of theBased-In Artist,
http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/online-digital-artwork-and-the-status-of-the-based-inartist/
Hito Steyerl, Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy,
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/politics-of-art-contemporary-art-and-the-transition-to-post-demo
cracy/
Liam Gillick, Weapons Grade Pig Work,
http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/weapons-grade-pig-work/
Tom Holert, Hidden Labor and the Delight of Otherness: Design and Post-Capitalist Politics,
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/hidden-labor-and-the-delight-of-otherness-design-and-post-cap
italist-politics/
Rob Horning, Artistic Autonomy and Subsumption,
http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/marginal-utility/artistic-autonomy-and-subsumption/
Nina Power and Sylvre Lotringer, Intelligence Agency,
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/intelligence_agency/
Rai Stones, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones