IN 1968, SOCIAL psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted a novel experiment. With the assistance of his graduate students from New York University, he bought a used 1959 Oldsmobile and left it on the street in the Bronx, hood up and license plates removed. The same experiment was repeated near the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, California.

From a hidden position behind a nearby apartment window, Zimbardo and his students continuously monitored the abandoned car in the Bronx. What they observed over the next sixty-four hours astounded them. Within ten minutes, the Oldsmobile encountered its first, and rather unlikely, group of assailants: a family of three – father, mother, and 8-year-old son. While the mother acted as a lookout, the 8-year-old helped his father remove the battery and the radiator. Shortly after, a steady procession of passersby proceeded to remove the air cleaner, radio antenna, windshield wipers, chrome strips, hubcaps, and other sundry parts and accessories. After about nine hours, random destruction of the Oldsmobile began: A couple of laughing teenagers ripped off the rearview mirror and hurled it at the windshield and headlights. Reminiscent of a scene from Lord of the Flies, a group of smaller children began indiscriminately smashing the car's windows and slashing its tires. At the end of the sixty-four hours, the 1959 Oldsmobile was a mere shadow of its former self, a useless carcass of twisted metal, the victim of no less than twenty-three incidents of theft and vandalism.

Introduction

Can artistic, cultural, and economic valuations ever be determined on common ground? The economist is inclined to say yes, in principle; as in an hedonic regression, artistic and cultural worth may be thought of as factors that help to explain variations in market price. However, this presupposes not only that artistic and cultural value can be scaled suitably, but that economic value somehow encompasses the other two sorts. Focusing solely on the latter point, the inclination of art theorists and cultural anthropologists is to assert that just the opposite is the case. Philosophers of aesthetics contend that artistic value is intrinsic, bound up in the experience of art, and is not reducible to some external use- or pleasure-value. Cultural anthropologists for their part argue that cultural value turns on meanings, whose implications extend to personal and group identities, which in turn are simply incommensurable with price. Moreover, identities are often threatened by markets, which arbitrarily alter and displace them without being able to substitute for the losses. Despite such difficulties, conversations about artistic worth, cultural meaning, and market value take place, as they must, in any context where limited financial resources are allocated to the support of art or culture. And, whether we like it or not, in those conversations tacit agreements are reached about relative values in each sphere.

Introduction

Contemporary historians are routinely asked to explain how certain ideas, individuals, and practices happen to gain great cultural value. They often respond by employing the concept of “social construction.” In explaining why Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) has been such a highly revered figure in American culture, this chapter traces the outlines of a story that not only has taken place in time, but has also entailed construction in the literal sense – an actual assembly of various parts of the story in particular stages, as well as a temporal process in which later stages were built upon, and out of, earlier stages.

All construction stories are guided by the concept that value is never just a matter of natural ability or talent. Yet, as Ian Hacking (1999) has pointed out, this apparently simple concept allows for various grades of commitment. The most controversial argues that we should abandon the notion of evaluation as a neutral account of objective qualities and accept in its place one that sees evaluation as invariably contingent on personal interests and needs. Less contentious is a historical grade of constructionism wherein intellectual historians (among whom I number myself) employ the concept of social construction as a heuristic device. They view enduring reputations more as empirical phenomena than as objects of suspicion. And the stories they tell about enduring reputations typically include careful reconstructions of a dynamic process made up of distinct stages, as well as discussions of what objective factors over time would justify the reasons for endurance.

Introduction

There is probably no point at which the cultural value of art is brought more clearly into public view than when art creates a scandal. This is nothing new. In 1815, for example, Goya's Nude Maja (La Maja Desnuda) created a public stir that landed the artist in front of the Spanish Inquisition, where he was forced to answer charges of obscenity. The work, today considered an icon of cultural value, was deemed culturally destructive by some authorities at the time.

Similar controversies about cultural value erupt periodically to this day. Over the past 20 years, scandals have erupted on numerous occasions in the United States, in which government funds have gone to subsidize the production or exhibition of art considered by some to be obscene, blasphemous, or offensively unpatriotic. The resulting value clashes between opponents and supporters of the offending art have constituted battles in America's so-called culture wars between one group that is traditional, conservative, and religious, and the other that is permissive, liberal, and secular (Himmelfarb 1999).

There are few better examples of a battle over the cultural value of art than the infamous Sensation exhibit at New York City's Brooklyn Museum of Art.

The complex U.S. arts system is viewed with curiosity and at times even with admiration. But absent a ministry of culture or similar central cultural authority, the United States has unwittingly advanced concepts of value that poorly engage the larger public purpose. From the perspective of an arts-management insider, valuation today resides in either the popular or the precious. However, one view overstates the significance of art as asset and commodity, and the other overstates the importance of the supply-side desires of refined arts elites. “Art-as-commodity” in the arts industries, and the “art-is-what-you-need-even-if-you-don't-want-it” view in the nonprofit arts, have generated unhelpful practices while raising thorny public policy questions. To illuminate specific problems and outline possible solutions, we must engage in a kind of reverse engineering, looking to the development of U.S. for-profit and nonprofit arts industries for factors that shape divergent definitions of value. To the extent that trade in U.S. arts products has spread the model of copyright-protected revenue streams around the world, and to the degree that countries with strong traditions of government support for culture seek to emulate U.S. cultural philanthropy, the unique challenges posed by commercial and nonprofit valuation in the U.S. arts system are object lessons of global significance.

Value in the for-profit arts

The 2004 merger between Sony Music and BMG has, among other things, put the two most consequential archives of recorded American music and spoken word assembled during the twentieth century under the ownership of a single, non-U.S. corporation.

The aim of this volume is to extend understanding of how value is formed and how valuation processes operate in the arts and culture. It does so against a background of a world in which market forces have become more and more powerful as a driver of public and private decision making. In these circumstances, economic considerations are playing an ever stronger role in assigning value to the things people make, consume, enjoy, buy, and sell. Of course in the arts and culture financial assessments of value have always been important, but there is a sense in the contemporary world that an economic basis for determining the value of art is tending increasingly to overshadow alternative concepts.

An essential premise of our project has been the recognition that a continuing difficulty in existing studies of value in the arts and culture has been the rigid disciplinary confines within which scholars have worked. This is especially true of economists, who tend to regard economic science as being capable of explaining all human behavior, past, present, and future, but it is also true in other directions – many cultural specialists do not comprehend what is going on in neighboring disciplines and may have a particularly ill-informed view of what economics can contribute to the debate. Accordingly, the project was designed with the purpose of opening up possibilities for interdisciplinary communication and dialogue.

Introduction

We often speak of the entertainment value of novels, plays, music, and other works of art. But cultural critics just as often contrast art to entertainment, viewing the former as culturally far superior in value. Is entertainment value an important part of art's value or merely a subordinate, inessential means to conveying that value? Is it perhaps even an unwanted distraction from true artistic value? This chapter takes some preliminary steps toward clarifying the notion of entertainment value by investigating the very concept of entertainment and considering its complex and often problematic relationship to art and to art's most cherished sense of value, which in the philosophical tradition of modernity is generally characterized as aesthetic value.

Although the precise nature of aesthetic value is unclear and hotly contested, it is generally conceived as an intrinsic rather than an instrumental value. Entertainment, however, seems to imply instrumentality – a means of distracting, amusing, or refreshing oneself, or a way of enjoyably passing one's time. So besides examining the concept of entertainment, I will also analyze the crucial but problematic notion of intrinsic value. This analysis will enable me to argue that intrinsic value can be reasonably construed in a way that allows a contextual contrast with instrumental value without presuming a radical dichotomy between them that would deny intrinsic value to things that clearly have instrumental value.

Introduction

The aesthetic evaluation of artworks (paintings, literature, movies, musical compositions or interpretations, etc.) is and always has been a very controversial exercise. Philosophers, starting with Plato, are not the only ones who keep arguing about beauty. Mathematicians (including Leibnitz, Euler, Helmholtz, and Weyl), physiologists (Fechner), biologists (Rashevsky, the founder of mathematical biology), and economists (Bentham and others) have also tried to contribute to the field, and no obvious path-breaking or definitive view has emerged. We find it convenient to follow Shiner (1996) and distinguish between philosophers who suggest that beauty lies in the artwork itself and those like Hume (1757: 6) who believe that “beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”

We identify three ways in which beauty of a work of art can be evaluated: as an attribute of the work, as determined by experts, and as confirmed by the passage of time. We begin this chapter with a brief discussion of these three approaches.

Beauty as an attribute of a work

Trying to break an artwork into attributes (also called properties by analytic philosophers, and characteristics or qualities by economists) is as old as Aristotle, who suggests in his Poetics that an object is defined by its essential attributes.

Introduction

The creation of sources of cultural newness is usually credited to the individuals who wrote, performed, or shaped the artworks. The newness is attributed to their rare “genius” – the painterly genius of Manet and Cézanne, of Pollock and Viola; the filmmaking genius of John Huston; or the musical genius of Jimi Hendrix. The relevance of the personal, mental, and physical contribution of artists is undisputed. This chapter tries to look beyond the personal contribution. Beyond the mental decision and its behavioral and material consequence, shifts in social circumstances take place, ranging from shifts in the immediate personal environment to shifts in the forces of society at large. These shifts change the constraints and the resources of those who are active in an artistic field. My focus will be on shifts in the availability of new resources and inputs, and on shifts in the relative prices of materials for artistic production.

At a first level, the argument uses a straightforward application of rational decision making: When the prices of goods that are relevant to artistic work change relative to the prices of other goods, the artists experience the change as a change in their financial constraints. Some options become affordable; others move out of reach. In either case, the artists, as well as those buying their works and performances, are faced with new choices.

Background

The guiding hypothesis on which this volume is based is that a distinction can be made between economic and cultural value, and that it is the nature of these twin concepts of value, how they are formed and how they relate or do not relate to each other, that needs to be investigated. These two concepts run like a leitmotiv through the volume, linking the chapters across the disciplinary boundaries.

To place the volume in its proper context, it is helpful to begin by looking over the historical evolution of ideas in this field, identifying the starting points and counterpositions from which the various chapters' arguments are derived. In the brief historical survey of the field contained in Section 2 of this chapter, we adopt a broadly chronological approach. Then in Section 3 we discuss the contemporary debate, dealing with literature mainly from the second half of the twentieth century to date. Finally in Section 4, we provide an overview of the volume and its contents.

Starting points in the literature

Debate about the relationship between cultural and economic value has been carried on in philosophy since Plato and Aristotle. Ancient thought claimed the attainability of a supreme value through the experience of bliss or divine pleasure; the experience of art played only a minor role in attaining that goal, and commercial action ranked even lower, being associated with the merely practical arts.

Introduction

Only recently has economic theory started to address the problem of cultural value and valuation when consumers' choices are involved. One reason for this lack of analysis is the ambiguity that surrounds, in economics, the relationship between the use-value and exchange-value, or price, of goods. This may sound a bit paradoxical, since in economics use-value, in the form of utility and preferences, has occupied a central role in explaining the determination of prices, inverting the previous paradigm of cost-based determination. Yet, since use-values imply an inextricable interaction of objective and subjective attributes of goods, analyzing them proved to be problematic and was left outside economics, in the realm of psychology, sociology, or medicine. For economists, choices freely made reveal the individual's reservation price and subjective utility with no need for further investigation, since basic preferences are deemed to be coherent and stable over time.

Utility, then, remains the main goal individual choices are intended to maximize, but, emptied of any real meaning, it bears no explanatory power in solving the complex interplay that runs between individual desires and constraints. Yet how use-values are created and modified in consumption, and how they interact with exchange-values, cannot be lost sight of if actual choices are to be understood. This is especially true when cultural values are at stake.

Recent analyses both within and outside economics have started to fill this gap, recovering an earlier forgotten tradition, in which use-value and individual motivations were central to choice; this is the eighteenth-century philosophical tradition of David Hume and Adam Smith.

Worth and value

The central theoretical issue of this chapter is neatly laid out by David Throsby in his recent book Economics and Culture: “At some fundamental level, the conceptual foundations upon which both economics and culture rest have to do with notions of value” (Throsby 2001: 14). The problem is that in determining “cultural value … no metric for combining the various components of value exists,” the way the price–cost metric does in cases of economic value. Moreover, there is “a tendency for an economic interpretation of the world to dominate” a strictly cultural one because of “the ubiquity and power of the modern economic paradigm” (Throsby 2001: 41).

I take these assertions to be axiomatic. The most important thing not mentioned by Throsby, however, is that one of the “conceptual foundations” upon which “value” rests is strictly linguistic. On the first page of Capital, Karl Marx says that the crux of the issue is semantic, a matter of inherent verbal ambiguity complicated by cultural preferences for certain types of usage. “In English writers of the 17th century,” Marx notes, “we frequently find ‘worth’ in the sense of value in use, and ‘value’ in the sense of exchange-value. This is quite in accordance with the spirit of a language [English] that likes to use an Anglo-Saxon word [worth] for the actual thing, and a Romance word [value] for its reflexion” (Marx 1967, I: 36n).

Introduction

Consider an artwork such as a painting, a novel, a symphony, a musical performance, a play, or some other work created by an artist. Much of the contemporary debate about the value of such a work focuses on the comprehension of value by the consumer (viewer, reader, listener, etc.). That is, value is brought into being by the interaction of the individual consumer and the work. In making their evaluations and reacting to their experience of consumption, people may be influenced by many factors, including the social, political, and cultural context within which the work is received; the historical tradition from which it derives; and the known or imagined assessments of others. But the essential feature is that value is a social construct deriving from individuals' reactions to the work of art. This interpretation of value underlies most of the economic modeling of the valuation of cultural goods, as evidenced in studies of demand for the arts, price formation in art markets, and the economic valuation of cultural heritage.

An alternative interpretation of the origins of value with a long provenance in the history of art is that value is somehow intrinsic to the work itself. In other words, it exists whether or not it is perceived by anyone. Under this tradition, art obeys certain fundamental principles, which are absolute rather than relative and define a pure purpose for art expressed in terms of concepts such as beauty, truth, mystery, and spirituality (Etlin 1996).