Critique as alibi: moral differentiation in the art market

Critique takes a key role in the political economy of contemporary art’s marketization. It gives substance to a moral involvement in contemporary art that is operationally central to the distinction between its primary and secondary markets. In so doing, critique serves to maintain the grip of the primary market over contemporary art. Accounting for the distinction between markets in terms of a ‘spirit of capitalism’ shows furthermore how, even though the primary market disparages the encroachment of neo-liberal marketization in its field of activity, in its reliance on critique it nonetheless serves to legitimize the social re-organization of capital accumulation by neo-liberalism. Critique is then identified as an alibi for marketization qua neoliberal capital accumulation. On this basis, the heightened cultural and market interests in contemporary art at precisely the moment when neo-liberalism has been a dominant economic model have to be understood as something other than just an effect of inflated asset prices and cheap credit. It is a commonplace that the rapid expansion in the volume, depth and price levels of the artmarket in the boom years of the early mid-2000s reflects the expansion and asset inflation of the growth of financial capital since the mid-1990s. In September 2007 The Art Newspaper presented a chart compiled by Art Market Research indexing how, after the collapse of the late-1980s boom in both the art market and the Dow Jones and FTSE 100, the art market gave similar rates of returns as these stock markets from mid-1992 to 1995, smaller returns and rates of returns for 1995 to 2003, then a relative increase in returns from art compared to the rise in stock prices from mid-2006 to mid-late 2007. Futhermore, the rate of return from art was much sharper in the period of mid-2006 to Summer 2007 than for either major equity market. The variation in how tightly or not art market returns are correlated to equities markets over the period of financialization confirms Olav Velthuis’s observation that ‘no economist has ever been able to prove that art prices consistently follow the stock market’s upward or downward movement’ (2008: 305). But the ‘consistently’ here depends a great deal upon the period under scrutiny. Since the recovery of the stock markets from the slump following the September 2001 attacks on the United States to the peak of the equities and art price booms in early-Summer 2007, The Art Newspaper notes that ‘the artmarket has been tracking the stock markets much more closely [than before], suggesting that contemporary art [prices are] linked to the 283 JVAP 7 (3) pp. 283–295 © Intellect Ltd 2008 Keywords