TOP: William Powhida, Griftopia, 2011.

Archival inkjet print, 8 x 4 feet.

LEFT: Kyle Fletcher, Fiscal Cliff Notes No. 1, 2013.

Inkjet on newsprint, 18 x 27 inches.

RIGHT: Kate Bingaman-Burt, JoAnn, 2013.

Thermal print, dimensions variable.

How to tread the territory of contemporary art

economics without submitting to either gossipy

breathlessness at the scandal of the market’s

informalities or portentous and pretentious

theoretical condemnations about neoliberalism

(one thinks of Dave Hickey’s comment that to call

the market corrupt under our cultural conditions

is like saying that the cancer patient has a

hangnail)? Curator Steve Juras’ answer is twofold:

first, to humor the subject, both through humor

as drollness in style and through humoring as

accommodating and taking up the logics of the

market in the very form of the exhibition. Second,

in critiques regarding the slippage between art

and commodity, rather than focusing on the

common analogies made between the high-end

art market and luxury goods, the artists in Market

Value: Examining Wealth and Worth take as their

points of reference the other end of the commodity

markets: gift shops, design products, and

The current prolific circulation of articles and mass market books about the increasingly inaccessible, exorbitant, and often fly-by-night high-end art market seems both deeply ironic and a perfectly logical entailment about Americans’ anxieties surrounding value and worth now. The art world is schizophrenically both elitist and democratic in its rhetorics: both a public cultural good and a lucrative private investment for hyper-rich patrons whose acquisition styles increasingly recall Renaissance art economics. The deep texturing of art as both a commodity and a symbolically transcendent intellectual object offers coy oscillations between appeals to price and pricelessness that offer half-answers to the serious questions we’re facing about what value itself is now—a telling fable about the ever-loosening relationships between value, price, and meaning.

is a multi-faceted investigation of economic, commercial and aesthetic value. Featuring artists from across the country working in a variety of media, this formal and conceptual cross section unpacks the ever-changing relationship between value, wealth, and worth in contemporary culture.

commercial signage; reminding us that outside of

the exploding high-end subset of the market so

often fetishized and condemned, the vast majority

of artists and art are part of a bigger stagnating

and shrinking middle market that parallels our

economic times writ large.

The show begins with an opening performance

of social exchange, Safe $ Secure, in which three

ostensible security guards’ scripted vigilance

gradually gives way to improvisation with the

audience. The performance, which acts to embody

and open up questions about the relationships,

particularly involving power and authority, formed

under particular kinds of security economics,

also pokes wryly at one of the most foundational

conceptions in modern economics: that markets

automatically refine human instincts into positive

social relationships. Famously, Adam Smith’s

classic explanation that the butcher, baker, and

candlestick maker work out of self-interest alone,

but in doing so create a better society for all, has

now been taken up by neoclassical economics

as a commonplace argument that the structure

of capitalism as such creates the conditions for

rewarding social ends. Safe $ Secure, in contrast,

questions the sorts of roles we take on in late

capitalism when all relationships are increasingly

mediated by market logics—and the threat of

violence underlying them.

The contrast between the rent-a-guard trope—a

ubiquitous marker of privatization —and the

college gallery setting also destabilizes common

understanding of the roles of different institutions

in the market. Kyle Fletcher and Derek Moore’s

creation of Upper Crust Auction House, an auction

website for the show, further calls into question the

relationship between the outward sanctity of the

college from market forces and frames the space

as both a literal and metaphorical marketplace. We

are now used to the auction house supplanting the

curator, the collector as critic, with financial firms

and institutions bypassing the figures that used to

be called on to turn symbolic capital and culture

capital into real capital—particularly the critic.

Within this sea change, where the perceptions and

judgments of critics and gallerists are replaced

by market logics of investment and risk-taking,

the condemnations of financial logics by critic-

turned-artist William Powhida feel particularly

germane. Powhida’s meticulous infographic

tracing the culpable parties in the 2008 financial

crisis provocatively mirror handwritten essays

that explain in heartbreaking detail step-by-step

directions to manipulating art markets.

Investment as meaning-making is only the strongest

case of another economic motif that underlies the

show: money as a kind of language that speaks

about itself. Two artists use the symbolism of

price and the material of currency themselves as

mediums. Chad Person’s typographic inscriptions

Kate Bingaman-Burt

Alice Bradshaw

Angela Finney-Hoffman

Kyle Fletcher

Jason Frohlichstein

Mitch Hollingsworth

Mark Merrit

Derek Moore

Steve Moore

William Napperson

Ches Perry

Chad Person

Jason Polan

William Powhida

FEATURING

on canvas express clichés—know when to fold em,

fast and loose—with lettering that consists of minute

fragments of currency. Person subtly undermines

the economic notion that substantive information

is embedded in prices; we might think of Hayek’s

argument that the real meaning of price is just

shorthand for relationships, a “mechanism for

communicating information” that coordinates “the

separate actions of different people.” Jason Polan’s

stack of $2 bill prints also point to the fictions

created through pricing money; the bill, which is in

fact not out of circulation, is not worth more than its

face value, despite myths to the contrary. Polan’s

playful critique of “value adding” in the art market,

in which symbolic value surpasses the literal worth

of the art object through information asymmetry and

perceived scarcity, points out that this tendency is

endemic to markets at large.

Continuing the theme of the artist as a value-adder,

we might think of Isabelle Graw’s insights into the

artist’s personhood as a product, and the artist as

a kind of exceptional being whose autobiography

is the source of worth in the work. Kate Bingaman-

Burt’s hand-drawn receipts provide a counterpoint

to this idea, where the autobiography of the artist

provides a conduit between personal value and

commerce. Angela Finney-Hoffman’s work explores

a parallel conception of value-adding by the artist

with VS., a found ping-pong table that the artist,

a professional interior designer, altered so that

plywood covers one half, in contrast to elegant

embroidered canvas on the opposite surface. That

the game is still fully functional attests to the fluidity

of the back-and-forth exchange between worth and

value in art market rhetoric.

The heart of the exhibition lies in the tension

Finney-Hoffman embodies as an artist who also

works in fields seen as more commoditized: interior

decoration in her case. For artist and designer Jason

Frohlichstein, the focus of critique is design as an

ephemeral product, quickly consumed and often

never distributed. His installation consisting of stacks

of newspapers distributed for free offers a substantive

ABOVE: Jason Frohlichstein, The Various, 2013 (publication).

Inkjet on newsprint (edition of 1000), 11 x 14 inches.

LEFT: Chad Person, Fast and Loose, 2011.

U.S. currency on canvas, 16 x 16 inches.

BOTTOM LEFT: Jason Polan, Three Dollar $2 Bill, 2013.

Risograph printed in red, signed in pencil on reverse,

open edition, 8.5 x 5.5 inches.

Monica Westin is a PhD student and University

Fellow, focusing on rhetorical theory and

its intersections with historical debates in

philosophical aesthetics and critical digital

theory, at the University of Illinois in Chicago’s

English Studies department. She teaches in the

Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse Department

and the New Media Studies graduate program at

DePaul University. Her criticism and journalism

has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Believer,

BOMBblog, and Art21, among other places.

institutional critique of the consumption of art itself

as a form of mass media. Fletcher continues this

direct confrontation of the consumption of art in

his Fiscal Cliff Notes poster series, which presents a

command to the viewer not to buy the work, both

inviting and then resisting the investment of both our

attention and money into the piece.

Art has always been a special kind of commodity,

both sacred in its symbolic aesthetic elements

for those who experience it as an intellectual

object, and a profane material good that can be

sold, marketed, and collected. As simple as this

duality is, the parallels drawn between art markets

and other markets continue to be striking and

enlightening, both of the way we fetishize both art

and of the role of cultural capital in all markets.

The fear of the commoditization of art, as Pop art,

conceptualism, and photographic documentation

have steadily marched contemporary art away

from exceptionality and into a world of substitutes

and what a Thomas Crow editorial from April

2008’s Artforum, just before the financial collapse,

calls “principle of equivalence.”

Several artists in the show take up this theme, but

rather than referencing the obvious luxury-goods

market, they draw connections between art and

more “lowly” commodities, highlighting the role

of the middle market for art, which is feeling the

effects of the current economy in a disproportional

way to the still-exploding high-end subset of the

market. Steve Moore and professional sign painter

Ches Perry’s collaborative aphorisms combine

Perry’s commercial signage lettering with Moore’s

hollow, ad-speak truisms about value—and, placed

in the front windows of the gallery, both frame the

show and recall mom-and-pop shop storefronts,

yet another victim of the financial crisis. Alice

Bradshaw’s souvenir items—limited edition badges,

bags, puzzles, and cups-- recall gifts shops from

museums and other global tourist attractions.

The images they present are selected archival

images from the artist’s Museum of Contemporary

Rubbish, an online photographic archive of

detritus and discarded material culture. The final

work draws on the running theme of the artist

as injector of aesthetic value and the imminent

collapse between, and endless recycling of, art and

devalued commercial objects.

The public imagination of the relationship between

price and pricelessness in art ultimately allows art

to be a proxy for value itself. As Rachel Cohen

points out, “we have long entrusted the task of

representing our ideas of value to members of

two professions that might seem to have little in

common: banking and art.” The wild speculation,

idiosyncratic regulation, and lack of transparency

that marks both the current financial ecosystem

and art markets betrays the myths and fallacies

of openness and structural fairness involved

in both: there is nothing “free” about the free

markets we now inhabit. The slipperiness of

wealth and worth is only more obvious in the

semi-autonomous role of contemporary art in

global markets, in its unique position in the

global economy. The game of coming together

to come up with prices is only more obviously

informal in the art market. Other places for

assigning value and price are just as arbitrary,

with people coming together and deciding what

something is worth, oftentimes with disregard

to actual cost; we might think of externalities

involved in environmental damage, for example

factory farming and the real cost of a $.99

hamburger. Market Value: Examining Wealth and

Worth offers only one of endless inlets into a

critique of contemporary economics, where the

deepest problem is the faith we put in prices of

any kind as a way of valuing the world, and where

there is serious work to be done in making the

idea of value and money congruent at a moment

in which they are strikingly unaligned.

TOP LEFT: Angela Finney-Hoffman, VS., 2013.

Concept sketch for site-specific installation.

TOP RIGHT: Alice Bradshaw, Museum of Contemporary

Rubbish Jigsaw, Item #0451 (takeaway box, UK). Card backed

lustre print, 12 x 8 inches.

ABOVE: Steve Moore & Ches Perry, Value the Worthless on

Purpose, 2013. Sign paint on butcher paper, 24 x 36 inches.

This exhibition is sponsored by the Art + Design Department at Columbia College Chicago and Anchor Graphics. This exhibition is partially supported by an Illinois Arts Council Grant, a state agency.

ar t + design

A + D AVERILL AND BERNARD LEVITON

A+D GALLERY

619 SOUTH WABASH AVENUE

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 60605

312 369 8687

COLUM.EDU/ADGALLERY

GALLERY HOURS

TUESDAY – SATURDAY

11AM – 5PM

THURSDAY

11AM – 8PM

ABOVE: Mark Merrit, Mitch Hollingsworth, and

William Napperson, Safe $ Secure, 2013. Performance.

Photography by Joshua Longbrake