Ad Valorem: On Denis Beaubois\'s Currency Project

Ad Valorem: On Denis Beaubois’s Currency project Christopher Williams-Wynn Contemporary art lacks coherent and absolute principles for determining its form, content or context. This truism implies that it is increasingly difficult to sustain the ideological separation of artistic pursuits and commercial interests. This erosion of artistic conventions and institutions can be traced through the history of art and philosophy, which contain perennial declarations of the ‘end of art’. In 1835, G. W. F. Hegel published his lectures on aesthetics in which he pronounced the end of art, meaning that art would no longer serve as an adequate vehicle for the expression of human self-understanding. Art would be replaced by philosophy.[1] Following Hegel, Arthur Danto argues that there is no longer any single role for art, no ‘historically mandated directions for art to go in’.[2] Peter Bürger claims that the European avant-gardes of the early twentieth century wanted to merge art and life.[3] This desire represents another attempt to dissolve any singular concept of art’s autonomy. These ‘end of art’ theses generally refer to a breakdown in the teleological model of artistic progress and the status of art in society, with consequences for the place of art. Faced with challenges to its supposed autonomy, art has been absorbed by the general economic and cultural structures of society. Artists too have participated in this debate, affirming and disavowing such claims as they go. Commenting on his monochromes (exhibited in 1921), Alexander Rodchenko claimed in 1939 that he had ‘reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. [He] affirmed: it's all over.’[4] He was, of course, speaking in the context of painting and its conventions. His statement does, however, serve as an example of an attempt to bring a particular medium to an end. Thirty years later Joseph Kosuth published Art after Philosophy, in which he argued an alternate position: philosophy was exhausted and art was its continuation.[5] Turning towards commerce, Andy Warhol stated in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again that ‘[b]usiness art is the step that comes after Art’.[6] More recently, former Artforum editor Jack Bankowsky has identified the emergence of ‘Art Fair Art’. Considering the art market as an unavoidable condition of contemporary art production, he argues that artists regard the global market itself as either an object of critical attention or a mechanism for commercial gain.[7] The period ‘after art’ appears split between the quest for meaning and the circulation of capital. A rigid contrast between aesthetic and commercial value is, however, a false binary. Contrary to the view that art occupies a transcendental position beyond its conditions of production and reception, this essay proposes that in a period ‘after art’, art derives meaning partly from its imbrication with the circulation of capital. While art has long been tied to wealth and power, the spread of a global art market has made escape from its reach all but impossible. From the domination of commercial galleries such as Gagosian to the secondary auction market with turnover exceeding 10 billion dollars,[8] the global art business is firmly entrenched. Not every artist (or writer, curator or

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other art world subject) will be directly entangled within the market, yet it would be disingenuous for artists to ignore such commercial power. On this point, Ian Burn’s remarks on the status of art, made almost 40 years ago, are as relevant as ever: ‘Not only do works of art end up as commodities, but there is also an overwhelming sense in which works of art start off as commodities’. [9] To claim a position beyond market influence is naïve since even negating the art market inherently acknowledges it. Artists can interrogate this circuit between art and capital. Much like art, capital comes in many forms. Of particular relevance to this essay is financial capital, which refers to a resource measured in terms of money and deployed through processes of exchange. Various artists in the twentieth century including Warhol and Louise Lawler have engaged with financial capital through photography, painting or even money itself. [10] These concerns inform Denis Beaubois’s Currency (2011- ongoing) project, which consists of cash as a material object. For this project Beaubois acquired $20 000 in the form of 200 new $100 banknotes, facilitated through an Australia Council grant. He documented components of the work, videotaping himself counting out the notes and photographing the safety deposit box at the bank. Introducing a performative element into this project, Beaubois arranged for the work to be publicly sold. On the evening of Wednesday 31 August 2011, Deutscher and Hackett auctioned Beaubois’s money ‘sculpture’ in Melbourne. Following bidding, the hammer price was $17 500. After adding a buyer’s premium of 22 per cent (including 2 per cent GST), the final price was $21 350. In the end, the artist received $15 960, effectively losing $4 040 on the original grant, while the buyer overpaid the actual dollar amount. It could be surmised that these differences indicate disparities between the exchange value of the money per se and some quantifiable aesthetic value. One might argue that Beaubois’s monetary loss signifies a dearth of aesthetic worth, as though the work were not worth the paper (actually, plastic) that it is printed on. In a contradictory fashion, the final amount paid by the bidder could suggest that the work’s aesthetic worth exceeds its nominal exchange value. Yet it is difficult to reduce the complexities of a work of art to a dollar value. The discrepancy between the amount paid and received highlights the complexity of valuation that is structured and mediated by the market. It might also be tempting to regard these differences as a sign of the low regard for art in a society largely ordered through relations of financial exchange. Such an argument, however, capitulates to an ideological position that measures value only through a single unit of measurement: money. A more complex reading of the conjunction between aesthetic and commercial value is provided in Jean Baudrillard’s critique of political economy. As part of his analysis of art and commerce, he develops four ‘logics’ that structure social relations: use value, exchange value, symbolic exchange and sign value.[11] Use value describes the functional value of an object while exchange value refers to its market value expressed in monetary terms. Symbolic value expresses intersubjective value: it is both a material and

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transparent expression of a relationship between individuals within a system.[12] Sign value, by contrast, is generated with respect to different objects within a system; the element of exchange between individuals is rendered opaque.[13] Armed with this schema, Baudrillard analyses the structure of the art auction, focusing on paintings. He states that the ‘essential function of the auction is the institution of a community of the privileged who define themselves as such by agonistic speculation upon a restricted corpus of signs’.[14] Combining exchange value, symbolic exchange and sign value, the art auction establishes a community of peers seeking recognition from one another. The process of bidding at auction involves a declaration of desire directed toward the object. The winning bidder distinguishes him or herself as a peer of distinction with the means to engage in a contest of desire by exchanging money for the art object. This combination of money and desire transforms the object into a luxury item that signifies prestige. Importantly, these acts must take place publicly. Without witnesses to the act of consumption and sacrifice, there would be no accrual of prestige. As Baudrillard puts it: ‘It is not the quantity of money that takes on value, as in the economic logic of equivalence, but rather money spent, sacrificed, eaten up according to a logic of difference and challenge.’[15] This annihilation of monetary value occurred quite literally in Beaubois’ project. When auctioned, there was a destruction of exchange value: the final price exceeded the nominal dollar amount of the cash. While Baudrillard limits this logic of sacrifice to the bidder, Beaubois extends it to the artist, for he too loses money in exchange for sign value. Through Baudrillard’s lens both bidder and artist make a personal sacrifice that nevertheless signifies and reinforces their social standing. Yet Beaubois’s project also short-circuits aspects of Baudrillard’s analysis. Describing the art auction, Baudrillard writes that ‘money is nullified as a divisible exchange value and is transubstantiated by its expenditure into an indivisible sumptuary value.’[16] Put another way, in the act of bidding, the monetary value is destroyed when invested in the marks of prestige. However, because part of the Currency project is literally made of money, it condenses Baudrillard’s four logics. In this case, the sumptuary value remains locked in the money form, and so able to be converted into exchange value once more.[17] Moreover, the formation of exchange value itself differs between these two approaches. For Baudrillard the auction establishes the exchange value of the item in question, whereas in Beaubois’s work exchange value both precedes and exceeds the auction. Beaubois’s project possesses exchange value before the bidding process—which, in Baudrillard’s account, is supposed to be established by the auction. At the end of bidding, the various dollar amounts render any definitive exchange value uncertain. The work thus threatens to undermine the uniformity of value usually created by the auction process. Hence the project hangs between art and money, as each refers to the other in a cyclical relationship.

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Just as money circulates, so too has Beaubois’s concept: the first iteration of Currency was in Australian dollars. He then produced another ‘sculpture’ by purchasing US dollars. Following the auction in Melbourne, documentation of the work has also been shown in various exhibitions, including The Financial Report at Artspace in Sydney (2013) and at the NARS Foundation in New York (2013). The form and circulation of Currency operates like money. As the project and its documentation circulate through networks of (cultural) value they are validated and enhanced at each temporary site of installation. This shift between currencies expands the visual form of the project, conflating the production of aesthetic form with a market transaction. This act also recasts the artistic readymade. If the readymade can be anything or take any form, then in a world largely dominated by market forces, money can be regarded as a meta-readymade. A currency transaction as readymade then represents an ‘end of art’ gesture par excellence: the nomination of an art object that refers to all others, including itself. Less the end of the art than a revelation of its imbrication with commerce, Beaubois’ project presses further to offer an analogy between art and money. Rather than an inherent value, its worth is accrued through circuits of exchange, whether of capital or signs. These circuits establish the value of almost any art object, since art historical and financial valuations will take into account exhibition histories, publications and provenance. More fundamentally, however, his project proposes a certain condition facing contemporary art: art can be anything, including money. In a cynical twist involving both abstract concept and concrete form, Beaubois’s work reconfigures Joseph Beuys’s equation CREATIVITY = CAPITAL as ART = MONEY. Economic discourse traditionally regards money as having three crucial properties or functions: a store of value, a medium of exchange and a unit of account. That is, a given quantity of money represents a stock of financial wealth that can be exchanged for goods or services. Beaubois’ project reveals that art can function along similar lines. A work of art could be seen as a store of aesthetic values (not to the exclusion of other types of value), subject to change according to fluctuations in critical and historical attitudes and judgements. Currency posits that both (contemporary) art and (fiat) money do not derive value from any intrinsic properties, but from personal judgement and institutional support. Beaubois addresses the aesthetic and commercial conditions that structure the contemporary art world. In effect, the Currency project reveals how contemporary art, without the need to conform to any particular constraints in a period after the ‘end of art’, appears homologous to money. It demonstrates that when art can be anything and anything can be art, it comes to resemble money, which can be transformed into almost anything and so is bound to

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virtually everything. Fundamentally, then, money converts difference into equivalence. Applied to art, this proposition could be unpalatable. In these circumstances, the Currency project does not point to the end art, but rather perpetuates the ambivalent relationship between art and financial exchange.

Endnotes [1] G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. [2] Arthur Danto, ‘Art after the End of Art’, in The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste, Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1998, p. 123. [3] Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-garde, translated by Michael Shaw, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. [4] Alexander Rodchenko, cited in Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, p. 17. [5] Joseph Kosuth, ‘Art after Philosophy’, in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1999, pp. 158-177. [6] Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, p. 88. [7] Jack Bankowsky, ‘Tent Community’, Artforum, volume 44, issue 2 (October), 2005, pp. 228-232. [8] Melanie Gerlis, ‘Auction figures for 2013 are in—and Christie’s again takes the crown’, The Art Newspaper, 22 January 2014, http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Auction-figures-for--are-inandChristies-again-takes-the-crown-/31587 [accessed 27 July 2014]. [9] Ian Burn, ‘The Art Market: Affluence and Degradation’, in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1999, p. 320. Emphasis in original text. [10] For example, in 1968, American artist Abraham Lubelski created Sculptural Daydream, a bale of $250 000 in $1 notes. See Marc Shell, Art & Money, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 108109. [11] Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin, St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981, p. 66. [12] Baudrillard, 1981, pp. 65-66. [13] Baudrillard, 1981, p. 117. [14] Baudrillard, 1981, p. 117. [15] Baudrillard, 1981, p. 113. [16] Baudrillard, 1981, p. 117.

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[17] Damian Hackett, a director at Deutscher and Hackett, indicated in correspondence with Beaubois that the moral rights of the artist prevent the work from being used as legal tender (Damian Hackett, ‘Letter to Denis Beaubois’, 8 July 2011, Currency: A project by Denis Beaubois, unpaginated, http://denisbeaubois.com/Currency/CurrencyProjectInformation.pdf [accessed 10 July 2014]). If the work has been ‘banked’, such action could constitute mutilation or ‘material alteration’ of the work, and so may be regarded as ‘derogatory treatment’ under Section 195AK of the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) (http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s195ak.html [accessed 28 July 2014]).

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