Three Cases of Value Reflection: Ponge, Whitten, Banksy (2021)
Banksy, Love Is in the Bin, 2018, aerosol paint, acrylic paint, canvas, board, 40 x 31 x 7 . Photo: Jack Taylor/Getty Images.
Isabelle Graw,
ISABELLE GRAW’S oft-cited 2009 book,
High Price, which explores art’s economy of fame and prestige as the prototype for creative labor under capitalism, was published just after the collapse of a speculative bubble in the market for contemporary art. Now, roughly a decade later,
Three Cases of Value Reflection: Ponge, Whitten, Banksy arrives contemporaneously with a series of meteoric high-dollar sales of NFTs (“nonfungible tokens”), a class of digital nonobjects that seems to reduce art to pure speculative value and the subject of a market bubble that seems to have burst with unusual speed. The idea that a work of art need not take material form at all is not particularly novel, nor is the idea that such a work might be bought or sold. The NFT phenomenon does, howe