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Art World Prestige : Arguing Cultural Value

by: Van Laar, Timothy; Diepeveen, Leonard

ISBN: 9780199913985 | 0199913986

Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Pub. Date: 1/9/2013

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Summary Author Biography

Artworld Prestigeexamines the ways in which cultural arguments about value develop: the processes by which some practices, artists, and media in the artworld win and others lose. Timothy Van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen argue that the concept of prestige, although uncomfortable and consistently overlooked, is an essential model for understanding artworld values, as important as the more common models centered on economics or power. Prestige shapes the forms of attention art is given, as well as the processes by which some affects dominate art dis... MOREcourse and others fall away. But prestige does its work silently, and its principles are used unself-consciously. People effortlessly display the protocols of being an insider. A form of socially constructed agreement, prestige shapes what we see, and does so with great power. Prestige is inescapable, a version of Althusserian ideology or Foucauldian power that both constrains and enables. It is also flexible, defining the seriousness of artists as diverse as Dan Peterman and Marlene Dumas, Gerhard Richter and Takashi Murakami, Elizabeth Peyton and Joseph Kosuth, Howard Finster and Frank Gallo. Cultural argument about value in art is a matter of deference and conferral, performed through thousands of tiny acts of estimation that suggest one cultural form is less relevant, worthy of attention than another; acts that instinctively grant more attention to reviews inArtforumoverArtnews; to the Tate Modern over the Hirshhorn; to anxiety over pleasure; to Duchamp over Matisse; to conceptual art over abstract painting, and abstract painting over figure painting; to painting over ceramics, and video over painting. In order to argue candidly about cultural value, the artworld needs to understand the subtleties of prestige, of such things as what it means to be "serious." Not an expos but an explanation,Artworld Prestigeoffers such an understanding

This book examines the ways in which cultural arguments about value develop: the processes by which some practices, artists, and media in the artworld win and others lose. The authors argue that the concept of prestige, although uncomfortable and consistently overlooked, is an essential model for understanding artworld values.

Why does the artworld often privilege one cultural form over another? Why does it grant more attention to reviews in, say, Artforum over ARTnews? And how can an artist once hailed as visionary be dismissed as derivative just a few years later? Exploring the ever-shifting estimations of value that make up the confluence of artists, critics, patrons, and gallery owners known as the artworld, Timothy van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen argue that prestige, a matter of socially constructed deference and conferral, plays an indispensable role in the attention and reception given to modern and contemporary art.

After an initial chapter that develops a theory of prestige and the poignancy of its loss, the book looks at how arguments of prestige function in systems of representation, various media, and art's relationship to affect. It considers twentieth-century artists who moved not away from, but toward figuration; looks at what is at stake in the recurrent argument about the death of painting; examines the decline and an apparent return of sensual pleasure as a central attribute of visual art; and concludes with a look at the peculiar function of prestige in outsider art.

Illustrated with artwork by David Park, Jorge Pardo, Gerhard Richter, Anish Kapoor, Cecily Brown, Howard Finster, and others, Artworld Prestige provides an engaging guide to the changes, debates, and shifts that animate aesthetic judgments.

Timothy Van Laar is Professor of Art at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the coauthor of Active Sights and Art with a Difference.

Leonard Diepeveen is Professor of English at Dalhousie University. He is author of Changing Voices: The Modern Quoting Poem and The Difficulties of Modernism.

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