Publications

Commodification / co-modification

By: Martine Rouleau

Martine Rouleau wonders what or who is susceptible to change the market. Can artists adapt it to their own expectations and should the demands of the market influence artists’ work?

The art market appears to be a temperamental, over-inflated beast that dictates the terms of production and consumption of art. It’s been injected with such ridiculous amounts of money that it knows no bounds: the demand appears limitless when collectors are glad to pay £17.9m for a Monet1, and the offer is just as extravagant for the likes of Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God, a diamond encrusted platinum human skull set to be sold for £50m. This is the most expensive work from a living artist on the market to date – the all-round actual sales record still looming at £70m achieved less than a year ago for Jackson Pollock’s No 5, 1948. There is no doubt that art is, among other things, a commodity, but is the London market really the autonomous juggernaut it appears to be? Can art and the market it is driven by modify each other – or co-modify? It might appear simpler to identify the market’s influence on the production of art than the ways in which the production acts upon the market, but it’s perhaps more fruitful to think of this dynamic in terms of the two sides of one coin. Although the connection might not be quite so...

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