Short review
Retracting to the Marxian framework of the politics of commodity production and departing from Simmel’s argument that exchange creates value and not the other way around, the edited essays in the Social life of Things shed light on the specific trajectory of commodity exchange by investigating into the fact that the complex processes of consumption and circulation of things also generate value. According to Appadurai, commodity should be defined not as a kind of object or thing, but rather a representation of a certain phase of social life in some things (pg. 17). This definition provides a link between object, its social value and temporal dimensions and highlights the dynamic and processual properties of commodity. The three critical dimensions - namely diversion, demand and knowledge were introduced to theorise about critical aspects in the politics of the tournament of value from the demand side. What lies at the center of the argument of the volume is that it is politics that links value and specific flows of commodities in their social life (pg. 57).
Diversion of commodities from their conventional paths often times leads to risky and morally ambiguous sentiment, where the debate about the potential detrimental impact of the commercial art market on artistic production suits a good example in modern and contemporary art history both in the West and East. Major art and archeology collections in the West, whose establishment are based on a mixed combination of theft, sale and inheritance and aesthetic taste which is critical in the evaluation of an object’s significance in the course of art history (pg. 27), have become common sites of diversion of enclaving commodities. And in addition, more recently, the economic evaluation and re-evaluation of their commercial value as well as a universal trend of legitimatising art collecting as one of the multiple means to strategically allocate and manage personal wealth have played an increasingly critical role in this multi-dimensional establishment that leads to further diversion and debate. In Baudrillard’s comparative analysis of the Western contemporary art auction with the kula system of commodity exchange, a sharp contrast is analysed between more mundane commercial operations instituting a relation of economic rivalry among participants and competitions in auction sites sealing competitors’ parity via “collective caste privilege with respect to all others, from whom they are no longer separated by purchasing power, but by the sumptuary and collective act of the production and exchange of symbolic values."
Diversion of commodities from their conventional paths often times leads to risky and morally ambiguous sentiment, where the debate about the potential detrimental impact of the commercial art market on artistic production suits a good example in modern and contemporary art history both in the West and East. Major art and archeology collections in the West, whose establishment are based on a mixed combination of theft, sale and inheritance and aesthetic taste which is critical in the evaluation of an object’s significance in the course of art history (pg. 27), have become common sites of diversion of enclaving commodities. And in addition, more recently, the economic evaluation and re-evaluation of their commercial value as well as a universal trend of legitimatising art collecting as one of the multiple means to strategically allocate and manage personal wealth have played an increasingly critical role in this multi-dimensional establishment that leads to further diversion and debate. In Baudrillard’s comparative analysis of the Western contemporary art auction with the kula system of commodity exchange, a sharp contrast is analysed between more mundane commercial operations instituting a relation of economic rivalry among participants and competitions in auction sites sealing competitors’ parity via “collective caste privilege with respect to all others, from whom they are no longer separated by purchasing power, but by the sumptuary and collective act of the production and exchange of symbolic values."
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