Re: <nettime> what does monetary value indicate?

[d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk]

In 1977 the Tate gallery bought the work 'Equivalent VIII' from US 
minimalist Carl Andre.
It was a rectangular arrangement of 120 fire bricks all of which shared 
the same height, mass and volume and were therefore ‘equivalent’ to each 
other. Andre used common industrial materials that could be bought 
anywhere and assembled by anyone. And in this case it was bought by the 
Tate for £2,297. Even in those days, this wasn’t huge money for a museum 
to pay for an art work but the scandal and general hoo haa was huge at 
the time and to this day holds a special place in UK tabloid culture as 
the ultimate signifier of art world bullshit. “Two grand for a pile of 
bricks!”
Like the NFT discussions Equivalent VIII also revolved around and raised 
questions of provenance. Might, someone not have secretly substituted 
another set of fire bricks for Andre’s
original ? How could we ever know whether we were experiencing the
original Andre? Etc etc. Signed certificates by the artist were the 
metadata of the day. Although he denied it the fuss might well have 
delighted Andre who as a Marxist had at some point had advocated selling 
art by weight. And in truth the politics of the best art of that era was 
the very opposite of the pro market obsession of the NFT venture. It was 
best captured by a book, Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialisation 
of the Artwork from 1966 to 1972. From the book’s title to the way its 
contents were arranged it shares the bare faced literalness of Andre’s 
work. And as her introduction makes clear the works represented were 
valued by Lippard in part because they embodied the impulse to explode 
any possibility of entering the market place on terms that allowed the 
works to function as market tokens or as “exchange value”. It was a 
different time.
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