Introduction

Works of art are produced, exchanged, and exhibited as objects of

value; they are also perceived and sensed as such. The specificity of
the work of art as a form of value is complex, primarily due to the
manifold historical contexts linked with the concept of “art” and the
enigmatic attributes intertwined with commodities. Anita Chari,
summarizing Adorno’s position, explains how artworks inevitably
become subject to the commodification framework and its resultant
effects on value. “Even supposedly autonomous artworks fall within
the sphere of the social totality of commodity exchange. They are
fetishes in the same sense that other kinds of commodities are fetishes:
they obscure the labor that went into producing them and appear
to be objects that satisfy a particular kind of need, exchanged in
accordance with the abstract medium of exchange value”.1 Artworks
are perceived as commodities since they are created in a society where
commodity production and exchange reign as the predominant mode
of social mediation. Acknowledging this fact prompts reflection on
the direct consequences of this unavoidable frame of reference during
the moment of phenomenological perception of any object indicated
as a work of art. The conditions shaping the interaction between
the observer and the art object are pivotal to what unfolds over time
in art galleries, art studios, museums, or biennials. This evaluation
holds significance not only for contemporary art viewers but also for
contemporary artists seeking to remain relevant in the face of artistic
trends, data flows, and economic factors. Authors such as Anita Chari,
Isabelle Graw, Christoph Menke, Sebastian Egenhofer, and Peter
Osborne view the analysis of the preconditions of art production
as critical—a perspective also implied arguably in the works of
Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, and Deleuze.
Perception is not a pure, unmediated experience but is instead
influenced by historically shaped concepts that define the experience
itself 2 3. The perception of commodities and artworks adheres to this

1. Anita Chari. A political economy of the senses: neoliberalism, reification, cri-

tique.
2. Sellars, Wilfrid. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. 1956.
3. McDowell, John. Mind and World. 2nd ed. Cambridge, M. Harvard University
Press, 1996.
simple assumption, which is why we must first explore the “mystery”
of commodities to understand the impact of the value form. If
artworks are special kinds of commodities, then their value-form as
commodities serves as the foundational element we aim to clarify to
gain a deeper understanding of the impact of value on contemporary
art. This approach goes beyond the economic exceptionalism proposed
by Dave Beech4 and does not intend to undermine artists’ or curators’
intentions but rather to give full credit to the independence of the
artwork and to all the historical and material pre-production and
pre-perception conditions. The moment of perception is a creative
encounter, as Duchamp emphasized, and it is through this event that
considerations about commodities and how the value appears in work
of art should perhaps follow.
In the following text the commodification process will be
used as a starting point to describe the problematic consequences of
artworks’ value-form. Marx’s value theory will further aid in exploring
this topic. Following a brief but necessary disambiguation of the
term “contemporary art” as a post-conceptual practice, the concept
of “enframing aura” will be introduced as a key concept to investigate
the specificity of artworks’ value-form. This analysis will lead to the
hypothesis that the presence of a unique intertwined double “value”
defines the contemporary artwork itself.
While we might hope for the spectator to be left alone, exposed to the
artworks without elaborate architectures, labels, prestige effects, guides,
or author names (unless these elements are inherent to the work itself ),
we cannot ignore that these indicators of value ( value as social fact5)
are inevitable in a complex society where commodification, delegation
of choices, and recommendations are embedded in every aspect of life.
Signs of value permeate every element of an artwork or publication,
including the choice of typeface, the exhibition space, or the absence of
an author’s name.
“The Merge of Times” was crafted as a compilation of notes
with the intent to provide theoretical underpinning for a series of

4.  Beech Dave. Art and Value. Art`s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neo-
classical and Marxist economics. 2015.
5. Michael Heinrich. How to read Marx ‘s Capital. 2021. Originally published
as Wie das Marxsche Kapital Lesen?.
artworks ultimately brought together in Chapter I of the artist’s book
titled “To carve out time with objects.” Ideally, Chapter I, entitled
“How the Value Appears,” could serve as the culminating segment of
the subsequent text, progressing from the general to the particular
and showcasing a collection of instances that illustrate a specific
embodiment of value. To uphold consistency with the artworks
delineated in the publication and to enhance readability, this essay
is presented as an independent self-published entity, conveyed in a
direct and uncomplicated manner. By doing so, we have minimized the
author’s influence and ensured an unambiguous reading experience,
attributing authorship solely to the editor. In the fortunate event that
this concise text is encountered in isolation, whether at a flea market or
within a library, we aspire for the reader to derive an optimal reading
experience, even without access to the main publication or awareness of
its origin.
The Merge
of Times
The question of
value-form
in contemporary
artworks

edited by Jesi Khadivi

I

THE LABEL & THE HIEROGLYPH. - Following Marx’s theory of

commodities, a commodity is something twofold, it is constituted by
use-value (a sensible form of existence) and the value-form (Wertform,
its social form). A commodity is fundamentally already a sensuous
thing and supra-sensible or social6. Developing his theory, Marx
implied that the perception of any commodity is already permeated
by two elements: the fetishist character of the product of labor, Marx
uses the term “attached” [Dies nenne ich den Fetischismus, der den
Arbeitsprodukten anklebt 7(...)], and the value-form.
Marx compares the value-form as representation8 to a social hieroglyph
stamped onto a commodity. It is interesting to note that Marx
compares the value attached to commodities as a social construction to
language itself.9 We already have at least two interesting guests at the
table when perceiving each kind of commodity (including artworks):
Fetishism is attached to the commodity and value form is “stamped”
onto it like a social hieroglyph. We will briefly introduce you two
famous guests who play a fundamental role here.

the label. - Marx describes how the commodity form hides instead of
revealing: “The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists
therefore simply in the fact that the commodities reflects the social
characteristics of men’s own labor as objective characteristics of the
products of labor themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these
things. (...) Through this substitution, the products of labour become
commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time supra-

6. K.Marx. The Capital. Section 4. The fetishism of commodities and the secret
thereof
7. Ibid
8. Christoph Menke. Art and the Reproduction of the Value-Form. In The Value
of Critique. Exploring the Interrelations of Value, Critique, and Artistic Labour.
Isabelle Graw, Christoph Menke (eds.) 2019.
9. ”Der Wert verwandelt vielmehr jedes Arbeitsprodukt in eine gesellschaftliche
Hieroglyphe. Später suchen die Menschen den Sinn der Hieroglyphe zu entziffern,
hinter das Geheimnis ihres eignen gesellschaftlichen Produkts zu kommen, denn die
Bestimmung der Gebrauchs, Gegenstände als Werte ist ihr gesellschaftliches Produkt
so gut wie die Sprache.
1
sensible or social. “ 10
Marx describes above an amnesia and a medium substitution:
commodities acquired the capacity to express social relations and
mediate them, without the critical awareness of the beholder. Val Burris
vividly describes this process of social relations becoming (sensuous)
things, which is also called reification: “It describes a situation of
isolated individual producers whose relation to one another is indirect
and realized only through the mediation of things (the circulation of
commodities), such that the social character of each producer’s labor
becomes obscured and human relationships are veiled behind the
relations among things and apprehended as relations among things.”11
This process implies a very special kind of absorption/
projection, let’s say from the past-inside of the object and increases the
potential for the exchange of goods. Producers are alienated from one
another, social mediation becomes indirect, and commodities become
the medium of social relation. As a consequence, human agency (as a
responsible actor in society) changes hands and shifts to the gigantic
mechanism commodity exchange, therefore it is not surprising
that “participants” could feel slightly disconnected and powerless.
The forgetfulness behind this process generates an astonishing
phenomenon Marx called commodity fetishism. The meaning of
the word fetishism was strongly connoted via Freudian tradition,
which deviates from Marx’s original use of the term. In the Freudian
tradition, fetishism is mainly associated with sexual fantasies and the
fixation on an object or a person, whereas Marx refers to the religious
“mental” products [die Produkte des menschlichen Kopfes mit eignem
Leben begabte] 12in reference to the colonial discovery of traditional
African tribal practices (popularized in Europe by Charles de Brosses)
to produce painted wooden or leather objects with special animated
powers.
According to Marx, products as commodities mediate
social relations and become “animated” by those obscured relations
in a phenomenological manner. We perceive goods as animated,

10. K. Marx. The Capital. Section 4. The fetishism of commodities and the secret
thereof.
11. Val Burris. Reification: a marxist perspective. University of Oregon. California
Sociologist, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988.
12. K. Marx. The Capital. Section 4. The fetishism of commodities and the secret
thereof. (86)
2
mysteriously enriched by features that were indeed proper to
social relations. The unconscious mediation of social relations via
commodities is a characteristic form of social consciousness under
conditions of alienation. Artworks are invaded by the fetishism of
commodities precisely because they are produced in a society in
which the exchange of commodities is the dominant form of social
mediation13. The process that compels even supposedly autonomous
artworks to be commodified and develop fetishist features is the
process of reification and it is implicit in the essential functioning
of capitalism, it is an emerging feature. If the term reification is also
strongly inflected by Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, we again
prefer to stay close to the Marxist meaning of the term because it allows
to make a direct correlation to his value theory.14 Reification is the
becoming-a-thing of these social relations, an involuntary delegation
inscribed within the commodity and in the artwork. An unconscious
mediation that transforms the perception of the object.
The second guest at the table of understanding artworks
as commodities is the value-form. It is a social representation, an
abstraction that can be expressed by exchange-value and money but not
only. We will explore the meaning of the term value-form in order to
better understand this social hieroglyph stamped in each commodity,
and therefore, into each work of art.

the hieroglyph. - The Marxist definition of value-form offers the clear

terminology and solid tradition that contemporary debates about
value do not.15As the predominant form of value in capitalistic society,
exchange-value can express a commodity’s value form but it is not
the only form of value. In the age of capitalism, an art work’s value
(like all other kinds of commodities) is defined by concrete labor-
value (time-work as production) plus the abstract work as pure social
construction16. Indeed, the exchange-value of an artwork is linked to

13.   Anita Chari. A political economy of the senses: neoliberalism, reification,

critique.
14. Rose, Gillian. The melancholy science. Specifically in Chapter 3, The Lament
over Reification.
15. Rabinowicz, Wlodek, and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen. A Distinction in Value:
Intrinsic and For Its Own Sake. 2000.
16. Heinrich Michael. Value, fetishism and impersonal domination. Lecture at
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia. 2014.
3
the continuity of the chain of production-distribution (attribution).
Although not referring specifically to art works, Michael Heinrich17
underscores the necessity of this continuity when he stresses how the
exchange-value in the Marxist theory of value is determined by a special
process of social recognition. Value is relational and created or defined
when the individual subject (the producer, or group as producer) tries to
sell/propose the product of their labor as a use-value product. Society
then evaluates the contribution of this work to the whole of social labor.
Value-form is created by relating, weighing, comparing, and equating it
with other commodities. This social construction allows the object to
enter the value-form system; doubled with this new persona (as abstract
representation of its social identity), the object can enter in relation with
all other commodities.
The assessment of the individual work’s contribution to the
entirety of social labor is complex, opening up a special window of
existence especially for the work of art. This evaluation operates every
time there is this specific kind of punctual interaction between the
isolated single (or group) producer, their product, and society.18 A
process of diagrammatic abstraction is applied to the product that
enables the creation of a representation (a sort of jellification of the
producer’s labor19) comparable with all other objects in the market.20
This is the process that transforms a work of art into a commodity, and
it is not a banal one, because it transforms ipso facto the very perception
of the objects. The imprinting process (stamped by value and labeled by
fetishism) that artworks endure during commodification and the reason
why it cannot be ignored is perhaps a bit clearer now, yet the specific
qualities of the work of art, particularly the contemporary work of art,
remain to be outlined. We can swiftly move forward while pinpointing
a few differences from some of Marx’s conclusions, primarily due to the
historical contexts.
a. Nowadays, the value-form theory applies to all artworks, irrespective

17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19 Heinrich, Michael. How to Read Marx’s Capital: Commentary and Explanations
on the Beginning Chapters. Pag.63 “Something coagulate or jelly-like (Gallerte) is
objective, but one cannot grasp it.”
20. Karl Marx. The Value-Form. Appendix to the 1st German edition of Capital,
Volume 1, 1867.
4
of their rarity21 as Anita Chari and Isabelle Graw22 already point out23 .
Marx excluded piece of art from his value theory without dealing with
the commodification of an artwork.24
b. In order to effectively address the problem of ‘how the value appears,’
we are focusing on the appearance of the art object. Hence, it is
particularly crucial to simply note that the commodification process
emerges during the encounter between the beholder and the art object.
Contrary to Marx’s assumption, commodification is already present in
the beholder’s perception of the (art) object even before the producer
allows it to participate in the exchange of goods (for example, during
a studio visit). Value appears in a very peculiar way beyond the spectral
objectivity. In other words, value can be also “felt” during perception in
the same way fetichism appears.

II

THE COAT. - Without delving excessively into Marx’s theory, it is

intriguing to highlight a specific instance of the concept of value and
how Marx elucidates the peculiarities [Eigentümlichkeiten] of the
equivalent-form of value. The equivalent-form (in opposition to the
relative form of value) could potentially hold significance in defining
the art object’s distinct position.
The relative value-form of a commodity is established through
its mediation with another commodity. In this value-form, the
commodity’s value is expressed as something completely distinct from
its own sensible existence. Conversely, we encounter the equivalent-
form of value, which, according to Marx, applies to all human products
that can be identified as an equivalent to another commodity (he

21. K. Marx. The Capital. Paragraph (130).

22 Graw, Isabelle. Working hard for what?—The Value of Artistic Labor and the
Products that result from it.. In Isabelle Graw, Christoph Menke (eds.) The Value of
Critique Exploring the Interrelations of Value, Critique, and Artistic Labour.
23 . Anita Chari. A political economy of the senses: neoliberalism, reification, cri-
tique.
24. Heinrich, Michael. How to Read Marx’s Capital. Pag. 73: ”Works of art represent
a special kind of rarity (a popular question in reading groups at this point): they are
unique. Since unique things are not “average specimens,” it makes no sense to talk
here about “socially necessary labor-time” and “magnitude of value.” Such unique
objects are sold for whatever a buyer is willing to pay, and so value theory of any kind
is out of place.”
5
used the example of 20 yards of linen = 1 coat or gold for every kind
of commodity). Quantitative definiteness is not contained in the
equivalent-form,25and the expression of value is inscribed directly into
the perception of object as “forms of appearance”. “The form of the
equivalent, is this: use value becomes the form of manifestation, the
phenomenal form of its opposite, value.”26 Value became perceptible in
the object that can assume the equivalent-form and allows specifying
and encrypting the mechanism and the impact the value form produces
in the very perception of an object.
In this kind of object, the intensity of the effect of fetishism is stronger
as Marx again indicates.27 When the price (ex. in the relative-value
form) mediates, the fetishism is reduced.
“Therefore, within our practical interrelations, to possess the
equivalent-form appears as the social natural property [gesellschaftliche
Natureigenschaft] of a thing, as a property pertaining to it by nature”28.
The expressed equivalent-value does not indicate its own magnitude
with a price or numbers, the alleged pricelessness of a work of art
and its occasional secrecy “push away” the exchange-value (even if
there is one) and empower the fetishist effect. The value of an object
is articulated through its very appearance, considering that emotions
and concepts shape and alter the perception of an object, and it also
contributes to the overall experience of the art object. When Marx
describes the equivalent-value form he refers directly to Hegel’s reflex
categories.29.
Hegel’s concepts of reflection and form are behind Marx’s analysis
of commodities and are, of course, valid beyond the realm of
commodities. The capacity of things to simultaneously express and
hide phenomenologically social relations, as well as the relation to other
things (its Form), is fundamental to humans’ experience of objects and
commodities. What we might refer to as a projection (Marx use the

25. “The truth being, that when a commodity acts as equivalent, no quantitative
determination of its value is expressed.
26. K.Marx. The Capital. Section 4. The fetishism of commodities and the secret
thereof.
27. The peculiarities [(Eigentümlichkeiten]) of the equivalent form in K. Marx. The
Capital. Section 4. The fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof.
28. Ibid.
29. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Encyclopedia 3.ed., Vol.1 - Logic. 1830.
6
term erscheinen als30) is indeed an emerging aspect of perception,
which, according to Marx, can elucidate the ‘riddle’ of gold and
silver. Marx’ allusion enables us to propose the hypothesis that, as a
distinct type of object, an artwork also possesses and conveys a form
of equivalent value: its capacity to directly embody (to simultaneously
express and hide phenomenologically) social structures, relations of
power, and cultural principles in the same way it can express the value
of an another commodity. Historically, artworks assumed the capacity
to stand-for a god, justice, fertility, etc.. in a specific way. According to
Walter Benjamin,31 art has its own historical roots in Tradition within
the context of magic, rituals, and cult. Since then, art objects have
occupied a very peculiar position. “The uniqueness of a work of art is
inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This
tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable.”32 . Our
hypothesis suggests that it is through these two different expressions
of value that the artwork’s Tradition-form of value converges with the
commodity form. Of course, the older pre-capitalistic value-form is
very different from the one proposed by Marx based on commodities,
but it shares specific common features that permit us to develop the
hypothesis.

the Tradition-value form. - “Historically, artworks have been

associated with phenomenological experiences that instinctively
infuse an object with value in a broader sense. Experiences of art
are connected to an object’s authoritative position within a cultural
framework of imperatives and ordering symbols.
The term “Tradition” is used by Benjamin to signify the historical
layering of artistic production. It serves to indicate that the concept
of an “artwork” stems from a lengthy genealogy of meanings, an
archaeology, (if we were to speak in Foucault’s terms) that each
new work of art claims to integrate. What we today call artworks
assumed the position of the most precious objects in a society both
topographically (in the center of a sanctuary, temples, churches,

30. Heinrich, Michael. How to Read Marx’s Capital: Commentary and Explanations
on the Beginning Chapters. Pag 53 and 54.
31. Walter Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
1935.
32.   Walter Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduc-
ibility. Second Verse.” SW, 3:101–33.
7
castles, palaces, etc.) and in relation to the personification of power
(near the sorcerer, the king, the priest, etc.) precisely because through
them social structure was symbolized, represented, preserved, and
reinforced. And the possession/control of works of art became a
symptom of power: society’s most important social structures were
synthetized and inscribed by artists into an object through effect of
beauty, technical skill, and the use of precious materials but also using
storytelling, symbols, architectures, signs, allegories, rituals, cults, and
ceremonies. To possess and control a building or a sacred object could
signify the legitimation to exercise power. Pierre Bourdieu briefly
summarizes this point in “Symbolic Capital and Social Classes”: “The
legitimizing theatricalization which always accompanies the exercise of
power extends to all practices, and especially to consumptions which
need not be inspired by the search for distinction to be distinctive,
such as the material and symbolic appropriation of art works.” and
“Like religious symbols for other modes of domination, the symbols of
cultural capital, objectified or embodied, contribute to the legitimation
of domination”.33
The inscribed contents expressed in the artwork conveyed
the magic/animistic projections (felt presence of a god, a spirit, an
ancestor, etc.), the relations/hierarchy between divinities (mirroring
social and psychological structures), the authority of the king or priest
(legitimation): the art object became the visible equivalent of social
structures and cultural values.
These relationships turned artworks into the abode (similar
to the equivalent-form in relation to commodities) for the
incommensurability of those values. Artworks are supposedly priceless
precisely because they stand-for priceless ideals, moral imperatives,
cosmogonies.The skill of the ancient “artisan-artist” to express the
presence of the “represented” or the “indicated” in the artwork charges
the object specifically. Ritualizations and cults are part of this value-
making process. Works of art are potentially inestimable and priceless.
This relation explains the speculative character of the work of art,34
its fetishism and the specific aura its expresses. Marx indicated that
the equivalent-value form does not have a quantifiable magnitude

33. Pierre Bourdieu. Symbolic capital and social classes. Collège de France, France.
1977.
34. Isabelle Graw. High Price. Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture. 2009.
8
but only an expression of value. Just as gold expresses the potential
exchangeability of all human products, artworks also express the
equivalence of transcendental conceptual, social, and psychological
ordering forces. The statue of the goddess contained the goddess,
religious relics still contained “something holy” of the saint, traditional
artworks contained the capacity to express and transmit those higher
ordering principles, at least potentially. Artworks became the forms
that inscribe a sense of community,35but certainly also a system of
order and a mechanism of power relations. The higher principles
and intellectual claims 36 traditionally inscribed within the artwork
are both subjective and social qualities, yet traditionally they are
still instructive regarding one’s behavior. In the cult object, believer-
subordinates consider an artwork to be evidence of the legitimization
of an established power’s authority. The capacity of this special kind
of object to instruct persuades the beholder about the legitimacy and
functionality of a religious-socio-economical-political order. The
prestige of the authority (the visible, perceptible aspect of power)
vested artworks with a special kind of charisma that Bourdieu called
symbolic capital when referring to a powerful person. Artworks
transmit symbolic violence because they participate in the ordering
of power relationships: “Symbolic capital would be nothing more
than another way of designating what Max Weber called charisma if
he,(...) had not made charisma into a particular form of power instead
of seeing in it a dimension of any power, that is, another name for
legitimacy as the product of recognition or misrecognition, or of the
belief (these are so many quasi-synonyms) by virtue of which persons
wielding authority are endowed with prestige.”37 We also consider
something legitimate or true because its authority derives from our own
feelings and senses. All ancient social relations are concealed within
traditional artworks and are ultimately reified in the same way as the
social relation of production during the commodification process.
Following this path, it seems we can attribute a archaic equivalent-
value-form to traditional artworks. The equivalence refers not to other

35. Jacques Rancière. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensi-
ble.
36. Isabelle Graw. High Price. Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture. 2009.
37. Pierre Bourdieu. Symbolic capital and social classes. Collège de France, France.
1977.
9
commodities but to specific transcendental aspects related to the
ordering cultural forces inscribed and hidden within the traditional
ancient artwork. It is through this special kind of equivalent-value form
that the ancient artwork expresses value again without expressing its
magnitude, as described by Marx.
The social-cultural conventions and the historical praxis
around the art object empower the artwork’s authoritative character,
inscribing them within a framework in which an object is valued
according to its starts, according to Tradition. Nowadays, there is no
need to be directly instructed by the object: we are already instructed
by the historical, conceptual sedimentation of what is supposed-to-be
an artwork, which allows us to instinctively intuit that we are in front
of an object of value—along with the exhibition strategies that remind
us of it.
Following Benjamin’s path, it became clear how this power is inherited
with the transition from cult-value to exhibition-value. Exhibition-
value conveys the authority and the symbolic structure of how the
new bourgeois society and political subjectivity functions: “It is this
paradigm of aesthetic autonomy that became the new paradigm for
revolution, and it subsequently allowed for the brief but decisive
encounter between the artisans of the Marxist revolution and the
artisans of forms for a new way of life.”38The ability of the work
of art to empirically self-explore its own possibilities became the
specialization of the modern artwork, marking a revolutionary break
from traditional forms of power.
The Tradition-value form is the second (but deeper and older)
form of value attaches to an artwork, thereby distinguishing it from the
ordinary commodity. In the same way the first commodity value form
produces fetishism, fantasies, and the promise of satisfying desire, the
second oldest one, what we can call the Tradition-value form, produces
its own specific fetishism, fantasies, and promise of satisfying desire
and needs. Both express value and modify the perception of the art
object. The art object is then inflationary, saturated by this doubling, a
contradictory overlapped object.

38. Ibid. 
10
III

THE HIJACKING. - In order to find a possible answer to how

artworks specifically function as commodities, and to describe how
the doubled value-form operates in the contemporary artwork, it is
perhaps useful to first propose a provisional starting point/band-aid
definition of art and contemporary art as a foundation for constructing
a clear-as-possible hypotheses.

band-aid definition of art - if we provisionally assume (via a definition

inspired by propositions from Arthur Danto39 and Jerrold Leviston40)
that one can literally turn something or anything into a work of art,
part of the complexity of what is specific in artworks as commodities
becomes a bit simpler. It’s thereby sufficient to merely indicate a
relationship with the tradition of art. Basically, anyone today can define
themselves or others as an artist intentionally indicating (implicitly or
explicitly) something or anything as her/his/their art.
This over-generously simplified process defines the indicated
object (like a piece of sugar, a playlist, the production of iron bar,
a moment in time, or a fictional character) as art. It is a horizontal
definition that does not introduce qualitative criteria of any kind but at
least clarifies what artworks are not. The entwined categories of artist-
artwork or artwork-artist simply point to the fact that an artwork is
something, really anything, that comes into being through an artist
producing or indicating something. So, it is the contact with the elitist
aspects of Tradition, which impart a special status to both the artist
and the artwork and exposes them to all sort of fantasies and inflation
of meaning and roles.

the merge of times. - In order to clarify the specificity of the

commodification of contemporary works of art, it is useful to
disambiguate the term contemporary art. Despite more common
definitions like “contemporary art is art made today” or “a movement

39. Arthur C. Danto. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. 1981.

40. Levinson Jerrold “Defining Art Historically” .BJA, 1979, pp.232-250.
11
that belongs to the present,”41 We refer to two authors coming from
different fields and perspectives that propose a similar meaning.
We refer very briefly to Peter Osborne’s query on contemporaneity
Anywhere or Not at All.42 The essential thrust of Osborne’s structured
arguments is that contemporary art is post-conceptual art. “It is the
convergence and mutual conditioning of historical transformations
in the ontology of the artwork and the social relations of art space—a
convergence and mutual conditioning that has its roots in more general
economic and communicational processes-that makes contemporary
art possible, in the emphatic sense of an art of contemporaneity.”43
It is the merging of different temporalities that defines contemporary
art precisely because the processes of unification and standardization
that capitalism imposes permit the confluence of different geo-political
temporalities. “In sum, contemporary art is post-conceptual to the
extent that it registers the historical experience of conceptual art, as
a self-conscious movement, as the experience of the impossibility/
fallacy of the absolutization of anti-aesthetic, in conjunction with a
recognition of an ineliminably conceptual aspect to all art. In this
respect, art is post-conceptual to the extent to which it reflectively
incorporates the truth (which itself incorporates the untruth)
of conceptual art’: namely, art is necessarily both aesthetic and
conceptual.”44 This same approach to contemporaneity has been
developed by Jacob Lund in his attempt to elucidate the notions of
anachrony and heterochrony through texts by Agamben, Rancière,
and Didi-Huberman: “Today anachronic approach itself is practiced
under specific historical conditions, and today these conditions are
characterized by global contemporaneity, constituted by the coming
together of different times in the same historical present.”45
The complexification of the relations between aesthetic and
temporalities is a way that enables the dismantling of the linear,

41.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_art, https://walkerart.org/

visit/what-is-contemporary-art, https://www.iesa.edu/paris/news-events/contempo-
rary-art-definition.
42.   Osborne, Peter. Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary, 2013.
43. Peter Osborne, “Contemporary art is post-conceptual art,” Public Lecture, Fon-
dazione Antonio Ratti, Villa Sucota, Como, 9 July 2010.
44.  Ibid.
45.   Jacob Lund, The Contemporary Condition – Anachrony, Contemporaneity,
and Historical Imagination. 2019.
12
homogeneous history of art and the word “art”.
And we also refer to the sociological definition from Nathalie Heinich46
in Le paradigme de l´art contemporaine, which indicates contemporary
art as post-conceptual genre. For Heinich, contemporary art is a
paradigm and it is inscribed within artistic discourse as consequence
of historical precursors like Marcel Duchamp, Allan Kaprow, and the
resulting artistic movements of the `60s: conceptual art, Fluxus, and
minimal art. Central to this paradigm are the concepts of criticality,
relativism, and limits understood as a reaction to the concept of art
proposed and established by the practices of high modernism. Although
fully outlining Nathalie Heinich’s sociological inquiry extends beyond
the scope of this text, we can nonetheless conclude that this similar
notion of art emerging from two different research fields and rigorous
methodologies provides a solid foundation for understanding the term
contemporary art, which therefore refers to the production of all artists
around the world who more or less directly or consciously implicate
the formal and/or theoretical legacy of conceptual art in their works.
Osborne summarizes one of the most important consequences of the
successful failure of the conceptual art movement by indicating that
art can, since then, be conceived only as both aesthetic and conceptual.
Indeed, post-conceptual contemporary artists are (perhaps indirectly)
informed about the questions raised during the `60s by conceptual
artists. Could we still say, freely citing the words of Roland Barthes,
that to make contemporary art is to know what it is not possible
anymore?47 Or perhaps what it is no longer relevant after conceptual
art? Perhaps a vain wish, but this definition at least permits discerning
what contemporary art is not. It is now specified, we hope clearly
enough, the meaning we attribute to contemporary art as a post-
conceptual approach to art making and how the two forms of value
(the commodity-value form and the tradition-value form) are inscribed
and active in every work of art-as-commodity. Still, a conceptual
tool capable of describing how the value-forms specifically impact
contemporary artworks is necessary. An old, but vital concept could be
useful.

46. Heinich, Nathalie. Le paradigme de l´art contemporaine, 2009.

47. Roland Barthes. « Être moderne, c’est savoir ce qui n’est plus possible“. Réquichot
et son corps », Œuvres complètes, t. IV (1972-1976), nouvelle édition revue, corrigée
et présentée par É. Marty, Seuil, 2002, p. 397.
13
IV

OBEY THE AURA.- Although the term aura is often discussed in

art theories, its meaning in discourse post-Benjamin is still, if not
controversial, at least a bit foggy. Furthermore, Benjamin himself used
it with slightly different meanings during the last twenty years of his
life,48 leaving room for interpretation. The concept of aura is broadly
associated with the singular status of the artwork’s authenticity but its
most famous definition already indicates another direction:
“A strange weave [Gespinst] of space and time: the unique appearance
[einmalige Erscheinung] of a distance, however near it may be. While
resting on a summer afternoon, to trace a range of mountains on the
horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer—this is
what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that branch.”49
Benjamin indicates the auratic experience (something to breathe) as
proper to common, everyday life. We are not in front of a work of
art, in a temple or in a museum, but in front of a branch. To further
underline this aspect of aura as a feature of every object, it is useful to
quote Benjamin again “Everything I said on the subject [the nature
of aura] was directed polemically against the theosophists, whose
inexperience and ignorance I find highly repugnant. First, genuine
aura appears in all things, not just in certain kinds of things, as people
imagine.”50 Aura not only appears in every object, 51but also in words:
“Words themselves have an aura”; Kraus described this in particularly
exact terms: “The closer one looks at a word, the greater the distance
from which it returns the gaze.” 52 Following those descriptions, aura
seems to be a feature of perception proper to human experience,
Miriam Bratu Hansen reaches a similar conclusion: “the aura is not an
inherent property of persons or objects but pertains to the medium of
perception, naming a particular structure of vision (though one not

48. Benjamin’s Aura. Miriam Bratu Hansen. Critical Inquiry. 2008.

49. Walter Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduc-
ibility. Second Version,” SW, 3:101–33.
50. Walter Benjamin, “Protocols of Drug Experiments,” On Hashish, trans. How-
ard Eiland et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), p.58.
51.   Walter Benjamin. Little History of Photography. 1931. (“a member of a rising
class, endowed with an aura that had seeped into the very folds of the man’s frock coat
or floppy cravat” (SW, 2:517; GS, 2:376)
52. Walter Benjamin. San Pellegrino paper. What is Aura.
14
limited to the visual).”53
A specific distinction of the phenomena of the aura seems to appear
when Walter Benjamin indicates in “Zentral Park” how Baudelaire
poetically “builds” the auratic character of commodities and Marx’s
idea of fetishist character of commodities is all around this text…
“Baudelaire’s enterprise was to make manifest the peculiar aura of
commodities. He sought to humanize the commodity heroically. This
endeavor has its counterpart in the concurrent bourgeois attempt to
humanize the commodity sentimentally: to give it, like the human
being, a home.”54
There is a clear distinction in Benjamin’s writing between the
authentic (genuine) aura and an artificial one, which is peculiar to the
commodity. It’s also interesting to note that Benjamin described the
aura as something that frames the object: “what distinguishes the real
aura is: the ornament, an ornamental circumference in which the thing
or being lies firmly as if sunk in a futeral. Perhaps nothing gives such a
correct term for the real aura as the later pictures of van Gogh, where
on all things — this is how these pictures could be described — the
aura is also painted.”55
He describes the aura again in “Zentral Park” as something created
by the poet’s words via allegory: “Derivation of the aura as a
projection of a social experience of people onto nature: the gaze is
returned.”56Indeed, if objects are animated, they can watch us, judge us,
love us...aura can be created by projecting social experience onto nature
and commodities possess a peculiar kind of aura. Benjamin used the
term “aura” but never (in my knowledge) referring it directly to Marx’s
Fetischcharakter der Ware, but we can assume that this particular
kind of aura of commodities is related to fetishism and that it refers
indirectly to Marx’s idea. We can also assume this is a kind of made up,
unauthentic, artificial aura, as opposed to the authentic one present in
every object. Benjamin used Marx’s concept of the commodity fetish
to form his own concept of aura. He created the term Phantasmagoria
in 1939 to indicate a vicious side of commodities that seems to

53. Miriam Bratu Hansen. Benjamin’s Aura. Critical Inquiry / Winter 2008.
54.  Walter Benjamin. Central Park. (20) 1939.
55.  Walter Benjamin: Fragments of mixed content. Autobiographical Writings
(1930); in: the same: Collected Writings Volume VI, Frankfurt am Main 1985, p.
588.
56.  Walter Benjamin. Central Park.1 939.
15
implicitly refer to Marx’s original conception of Fetisch.57 58James
Martel summarized the fundamental relation between the two terms
Phantasmagoria and Fetishism: “For Benjamin, the phantasmagoria
that results from such fetishism constitutes what passes for reality in
every possible dimension. We project our fetishism onto the objects of
the world, in effect enslaving ourselves via our treatment of them.”59
Benjamin described: a) the authentic aura presence in all
objects, b) the specificity of the artificial aura of commodities and
attempted to point out the specificity of the artwork’s aura. Ancient
art (ex. a sculpture representing a goddess) performs a special kind of
auratic experience, art objects were traditionally built up in the context
of cultures based on animinism first (the magic), rituals & cults and
religions after. The artistic-aura is there, even if it changes according
to historical context, and its specificity dwells in its connection with
Tradition, the link with its own history and the presentness of the
artistic object. The specificity of the artwork’s aura is its expression
via absorption, again from the past-inside, of sensed value: the aura of
artworks is given as authoritative in the same way phenomenological
reality is given to perception. This vicious acritical mechanism of
perception is precisely what Benjamin condemned in the artwork’s
aura. If the fetishist character of commodities is just one of the multiple
sources for Benjamin’s conception of the aura,60it is indeed also central
to his problem with the aura: aura is linked to conservative, vicious
preservation of modes of production, social relations, and oppression.
An artwork’s aura is conservative because it contains and expresses a
society’s established order of value and the complex relationship of
social production. Auratic works of art also convey reactionary forces
because of the authoritative power of the auratic experience.61
In this sense not only via the effect of beauty, but also through
the Traditional equivalent value form. Benjamin proposed the
practically unlimited possibility of reproducing a work of art through
photography and cinema as a solution to emancipate the masses from

57.   James Martel. Anti-fetishism: Notes on the Thought of Walter Benjamin.

2013.
58.   Markus, Gyorgy. Walter Benjamin or: The Commodity as Phantasmagoria.
59. K. Marx. The Capital. Section 4.
60. Miriam Bratu Hansen. Benjamin’s Aura. Critical Inquiry / Winter 2008.
61. Walter Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
1935.
16
the authoritative argument of the work of art’s unicity. Unfortunately
for Benjamin, capitalism itself has indeed a perverse sense of humor
about the good will of such a proposition.
After this short summary, we have already identified three
specific types of aura: the authentic aura of everyday objects (including
words), the commodity’s aura, the and the aura of the work of art. The
last two are artificial and have their own specific means of production
and possess the pernicious feature of hiding instead of revealing.
This short excursus around the concept of Benjamin’s aura seeks to
articulate a concept that can efficiently describe the specificity of the
artwork as commodity.

the coin and the Enframing_Aura. - Benjamin’s aura and Marx’s

fetishism shared a common broad background, simply said the capacity
of objects (a spoken word, the production of iron in Poland in 1865,
a fly tomorrow, a number, the crown, Santa Claus, a hammer, etc.)
to embody meanings, promises, values, and instructions hidden to
rationality but intuited and transmitted during perception. Both terms
refer to the paradoxical capacity of objects to express and obscure at
the same time. More broadly, aura and fetishism refer to conceptual
systems’ capacity to accordingly shape our sensual apprehension of
reality and the all-encompassing intimate interrelation of perception
and the conceptual. If things appear given to the human gaze, they
are instead embedded, intertwined on a fundamental level with pre-
existing conceptual, historically constructed social contents.62 From
a phenomenological perspective, the viewer deals with their own
passivity before the agency of the object, the system of perception,
and eventually the art object. We can be directly instructed by the
object (the gaze is returned) regarding what we can do and what we
cannot do eventually, and we are also informed about its position in
the system of conceptual and social values, we can sense that an object
is highly desirable and valuable and, at the same time, feel the danger
connected to approaching or possessing it. We adopt here the double
term “enframing_aura” to indicate how conceptual, historical, and
cultural elements are inscribed, embedded into the very perception
of all kinds of objects. In this sense, its meaning is faithful to the one

62. McDowell, John. Mind and World. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1996.
17
Benjamin indicates with the term aura. Indeed a “strange weave of
space and time: the unique appearance(...)” of an object perceived in
a kind of futeral, framed, separated by the rest of the other objects,
already active, alive, in a special kind of dialog with us, far away
because inscribed, formed beyond. We feel objects, we perceive
them in a certain way because of their auratic enframing. Words
and thought-concepts are also already enframed by auratic features,
or we can say that all ideas or concepts even only in the process of
thinking have auratic features because they are already enframed.
Phenomenologically speaking, all objects are brought into presence
through a generative process that create them “for us”. This process
assigns for us a position in system of concepts and values for every
object (including Santa Claus and heard words). Lukács’ History &
Class Consciousness already pointed out this basic construction of
fetishism as special kind of Hegelian second nature.63 64
We are bringing together two concepts apparently really far
away from each other: Benjamin’s aura and Heidegger’s enframing.
This weird couplage needs a historical compatibility, despite all of
the tragic differences between the two authors,65there is evidence to
suggest a personal connection between them since 1913.66 67
It is historically proven that the deep antagonism Benjamin felt
toward Heidegger and, as Gerhard Richter points out, Heidegger
had read Benjamin’s “The Artwork in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility” before 1956.68 The work of the two authors
has already been convincingly placed cote á cote by Christopher
Long,69 and the philosophical proximity of the two thinkers is also
confirmed by Hannah Arendt. I’d like to push the comparison further

63. Bertram Georg W. Two Conceptions of Second Nature.

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opphil-2020-0005/
html?lang=de
Menke, Christoph.Hegel’s theory of second nature: the lapse of spirit..
64. LUKACS, Georg. History and Class Consciousness
Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. 1923.
65. Christopher Long. Art’s Fateful Hour. New German Critique. No. 83, Special
Issue on Walter Benjamin 2001), pp. 89-115. Duke University Press.
66.   Peter Fenves. Entanglement of Benjamin with Heidegger.
67.   Andrew Benjamin and Dimitris Vardoulakis, eds. Sparks Will Fly: Benjamin
and Heidegger. Albany: suny Press, 2015.
68.   Ibid.
69.   Long, Christopher. Art’s Fateful Hour. New German Critique. No. 83, Special
Issue on Walter Benjamin 2001), pp. 89-115. Duke University Press..
18
by adopting the hypothesis that the two terms are philosophically
compatible like the two faces of a single coin: “enframing” is the
hidden cause of the appearance of the “aura,” and the “aura” of an
object is the phenomenological effect of the “enframing” process. This
couplage of words indicates specific aspects of the aura’s character.
The spectrum indicated by the term enframing_aura extends from
the aura of commodities and art to an authentic “aura” (less invaded
by capitalistic enframing) intended as the property of every object,
including mountains and thought words. All objects are indeed
enframed auratically and capitalist enframing as the main mode of
thought and socialization is almost everywhere, likely also when
perceiving a faraway mountain or forest; in this sense Benjamin was
optimistic when referring to an authentic aura. It hides first and then it
shows, expressing fake, made-up contents of fantasy.
Using Walter Benjamin’s categories,70if art represents the
medium of positive criticism, it should first free itself from the negative
criticism of Capitalism. Capitalism is the original negative criticism
because it operates by suffocating critical experience. Funny or tragic
enough, it seems there is a strict relation between the concept of
Enframing(Ge-stell) as indicated and developed by Heidegger and
Benjamin’s aura. In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger
points out how Technology performs a problematic squeezing process
on any kind of production by applying its own logic of quantification,
distribution, organization, and stockage.71 Every production is enslaved
by the Enframing power of Technology. The consequence of this
process is a system in which the same elements are repeated over and
over, recreated and re-proposed through shifting configurations, but
never really “renewed”. Like the reproduction of a meme, the same
elements endlessly mirroring each other in a familiar prison of crystals
to an impoverished system of reflection, a lost dance with the Doxa,
opinions. But Enframing is not specific to technology. As Heidegger
indicated, technological-enframing is a special kind of enframing72
and the danger of technology-enframing can be dodged only by artists
(particularly poets) digging into fertile and dangerous chaos.

70.   Walter Benjamin. On the Concept of Critique in Early German Romanti-

cism. 1919.
71.   M. Heidegger. The question concerning technology. 1977.
72.   Ibid.
19
Heidegger argues in The Question Concerning Technology that modern
technology should be understood as the loss of the unity between
thing and world (de-worldling) and as the reduction of ‘technics’’ to a
single form of causality, namely, causa materialis. 73
So, translating from Heidegger’s terminology, Technology produces
the implosion of meaning and social relations into the materiality of
the object. This process is necessary for commodification. If you think
capitalism and technology in Heideggerian thinking cannot be related,
you can refer to 74Sebastian Egenhofer’s analysis when he candidly
admits: “In my view, Enframing must be read as Heidegger ’s name
for ‘capital.” 75 The problem of Enframing that Heidegger points out
regarding technology can be applied to the necessity of art practice
freeing itself from the precondition of production that capitalism
imposes. Without falling again into Heidegger’s terminology, we
can say, paraphrasing Peter Osborne: The new new must be true or
not at all. It is not possible here to make an exhaustive analysis of the
analogies between “enframing” and “aura,” I refer the motivated reader
to make her own list. Enframing_aura features are not specific to
works of art, enframing_aura is everywhere because it is the very way
we perceive meaning. As suggested under capitalistic-technological
conditions, everything is enframed accordingly: from goods, data,
workers, forests, heard words, and artworks.
The power of the capitalistic-technological apparatus to regulate the
production and configuration of the relation between words and thing,
in short to instruct how we perceive and give meaning to objects, is the
contemporary condition.76 The impoverishment of human experience
under this condition is the Heideggerian final warning.

73.   Lotz, Christian. Reification through Commodity Form or Technology? From

Honneth back to Heidegger and Marx.
74.   Robert Carley. Money’s Gest: Or the Postmodern Materialism of Fictitious
Capital Formations. Duncan, Cameron. Modernity or Capitalism? Technology in
Heidegger and Marx.
Andrew Feenberg. Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of
History.
Michael Eldred. Capital and Technology: Marx and Heidegger by Thomas Brockel-
man. Zizek and Heidegger: The Question Concerning Techno-Capitalism.
75.   Sebastian Egenhofer. Towards an aesthtics of production. diaphanes. 2017.
Page 246. Note 52.
76.   Nathan Brown. Framing Modernity: Sam Lewitt’s Aesthetics of Saturation.
20
V

THE GHOST TRACK PROMISE. - “Beauty” (as ugliness) is

a quality of the enframing_aura expressed by an object (including
persons); beauty expresses social values, social order, and the desire for
access or possession. We perceive beauty as a special kind of auratic
experience. Beauty, as Hobbes wrote, is “that quality in an object that
makes one expect good from it” or “that which by some apparent signs
promiseth good.”77Beauty is the promise of Good or the promise of
value, as Christoph Menke suggested.78
If developing the relation between beauty and the concept of art would
exceed the purpose of this text, this relation is useful because both are
symptoms of the same enframing phenomena: an object possesses the
capacity to promise value. The historical fact that the phenomenon of
beauty has been associated with art itself for such a long time reveals an
important aspect of artistic experience.79It means beauty expresses social
values through perception or through phenomenological experience
via an enframed_aura, and this possibility has been used in order to
produce an “effect” of value and desire.
The anti-aesthetic use of aesthetic materiel80 in contemporary art
signals the necessity of underscoring the separation of the kind of felt
value experience that beauty and art deliver. The experience is always
mediated or better said “soaked” by implicit cultural and conceptual
elements that can be faked or re-created via sign and ritualization: an
object can be “charged” with value in the very moment of perception
if the beholder’s eyes (and ears) are instructed before the contact
with the object via storytelling, advertising, or the sign of value. The
symbolic power expressed via the architecture of the museum or
gallery guides the visitor to have this experience of made up/artificial/
relational value. At the end of the walk is the contemporary artwork.
Martel writes, “From this fetishism, an entire political order is created.
Benjamin tells us in the ‘Critique of Violence’ that even the bases of
law and sovereignty, the fundamental building blocks of our political

77.   Christoph Menke.The paradox of capacity and the power of beauty.

78.   Menke Christoph.. Art and the Reproduction of the Value-Form. In The Value
of Critique. Exploring the Interrelations of Value, Critique, and Artistic Labour.
Isabelle Graw, Christoph Menke (eds.) 2019.
79. Peter Osborne. Art beyond Aesthetics. 2013.
80.   Ibid.
21
order, are examples of what he calls ‘mythic violence.’” 81The mythical,
in the Benjaminian sense, is what is undisputed, accepted without
questioning.

VI

JUST A KIND REMINDER. - A short synthesis of the previous

points is necessary to further expand upon the consequences of this
analysis. Let’s start from the beginning: the object indicated as-art
must be inserted into society in the same manner as the product of the
work of any other producer (as use-value product) has to be proposed
to society to become a commodity (via reification) and access the
exchange-value system. The process of reifying artworks unfolds as
described above: the creation of an abstract social representation of the
object (value-form) and the attached fetishism. The artwork needs to
be immersed within “the flows of attention structured by the media
and the economy”82to function as a commodity and to be perceived
as such. The linearity of this process is complicated by the fact that, as
indicated by Lukács, Chari, and Egenhofer, the process of reification
flows in both directions: that of the perceiver and the producer—the
pre-condition of an artwork’s production as well as the pre-condition
of perception. Sebastian Egenhofer summarizes this process, describing
it as the “threefold nature” of the relationship between aesthetic and
the historical experience. 83 “It is evident that today it is no longer
the subject but the apparatuses of technical and mass media-capital
invested in computing hardware-that configure what is called world,
complete with its past and future.”84
When the artwork becomes exposed to its own historicity
and to the flux of the apparatus (that it can no longer be called the
artworld), it is commodified and the spectator’s gaze already meets the
art object as an object of doubled, saturated value.
We have then to keep separated the moment of an object’s becoming-
an-artwork and its being exposed its temporality. This little muddle can

81. Martel, James. Anti-fetishism: Notes on the Thought of Walter Benjamin.

2013.
82. Sebastian Egenhofer. Time, Money, and Matter. Aesthetic materiality today.
2013.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.
22
be quite important because it allows keeping the distinction between
use-value/exchange-value intact.
Duchamp’s provocative, “cerebral” work had significant consequences
precisely because it opened up the possibility of identification between
artworks and currency, and artworks as a stock of exchange-value. In
fact, to keep the moment of becoming-art and reification separated
leaves the door open to a bit of optimism. It is clear that the moment
of direct or indirect indication of something-as-artwork contains
already the reification forces of the pre-condition of production but
it also contains a little window of freedom that permit the artists
to try to act despite it. The process of reification is a dynamic value-
form transformation, an abstract flattening of a work (of art) that is
essentially relational and incommensurable with its own materiality.
The inscription of a work within the value making system transforms
the work because it “over-writes” a potentially delicate set of relations
indicated by the artist’s production and the social, historical condition
they operate within. These sets of relations indeed extend from
the work’s sensibility, concept, and historicity; but the artwork’s
commodification also becomes intertwined with the already-existing
Tradition-value form in connection with the supposedly authoritative
incalculability of transcendental values. In this sense, artworks’
mythological nature derives from their incommensurability with other
objects, a phantasmagorical promise of hope against death. The post-
conceptual character of contemporary art is fundamental because
the failed conceptual turn exemplifies the artwork’s abstraction via
its concept, which operates according to exactly the same process
as reification and the transformation of use-value to self-organized
exchange-value. Duchamp’s witty Monte Carlo Bonds go exactly in
this provocative direction, at the same time proclaiming the absurdity
of attributing speculative exchange-values to artworks. Contemporary
artworks are enframed_auratically with capitalistic values because
from production to distribution everything is made, more or less
successfully, to express these values: the sign of value making, the
rituals of value making, the cult of value making, the architectures of
value making, the storytelling of value making, exclusivity, mystical
property, reference to magic, to energies, etc.
The art world is a gigantic factory of old and new capitalistic value
making strategies for good or for bad. Christoph Menke argues that
works of art in capitalistic society are a paradigmatic exemplification of

23
the production of value form. Art, for Menke, works like an ideological
apparatus because it exemplifies the creation of the form of labor
power. Indeed, a pretty conservative role.85Benjamin followed the
same worried path in “Eduard Fuch: collector and historian”: “The
work of art had been detached from society to such a degree that the
place in which the collector found it had become the art market. There
the work of art endured, shrunken to a commodity, and found itself
equally as removed from its creators as from those who were able to
understand it. The master’s name is the fetish of the art market.”86
Fetishism in the art market is an implicit strategy of value making and
the continuity of production and distribution is essential because it
permits the full integration of exchange-value (based on the fetishism
of commodities) into the object as demonstrated by the process of
attribution, which is also described by Luc Boltanski in From Object to
Œuvre: The Process of Attribution and Valorization of Objects.87
This pessimistic point of view is not hopeful about the capacity
of the artistic work to resists the capitalistic enframing_aura, but
instead clarifies the extent of the danger. What if contemporary art is
essentially a wrestling spectacle between the capacity of the art-world
to commodify basically everything (concepts, events, historical and
social relations, etc.) and the often-naive resistance artists offer through
their artworks? Let’s develop this scenario: the art-world, which
mimics global capitalism, operates as a condition for the existence and
production of art works, despite the necessity for an artwork to resist
data and economic fluxus. The contemporary art market joyfully plays
with this contradiction exactly because the result, since the beginning
of the ‘70s, has been a huge, almost unexpected creation of symbolic
and exchange-value.
Sotheby’s Institute of Art reports it as a clear, conscious strategy. “If
I had to choose one thing,” says David Bellingham, Director of our
London Art Business Master’s program, when thinking about one
key art market factor of the 70s, “it would be how art developed as an

85. Christoph Menke. Art and reproduction of the Value-Form. In The Value of
Critique. Exploring the Interrelations of Value, Critique, and Artistic Labour.
86.   W. Benjamin. Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian - 1937. Translated by
Knut Tarnowsky.
87.   Luc Boltanski . From Object to Œuvre. The Process of Attribution and Val-
orization of Objects. [trans. Jason McGimsey, Daniel Malone]. In Joy Forever: The
Political Economy of Social Creativity.
24
alternative investment asset. It was during this decade that investors
started looking at the benefits of collecting art and art responded by
raising its prices.”88If the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971
could be related to this process, as Neil Cummings pointed out,89
the art-world still became the front battle of this process through
globalized art-fairs: a joyful peepshow into the possibilities of strategies
of value making, commodification, value stockage, and speculation.
The symbolic value (ex. The recognition of an artist’s works by their
peers or the esteem and positive reviews by academics and art critics
and journalists) and social value (the recognition of the role of the
artist’s work in cooperation with the social body) described by Pierre
Bordieu are functional to this process. The enframing_aura of the
artwork is integrated into the distribution and reception process
via publications, prizes, public talks, ceremonies, competitions,
exhibitions, etc., 90 in the same way it was during rituals and cult
ceremonies. Both symbolic and social value are integrated into the
perception of the artwork and participate in the creation of the
equivalent-form of value as described by Marx. Following this path, the
artwork becomes a front line for new strategies of “whatever works”
to create, reproduce, and store value. We can hear Benjamin and
Heidegger screaming together—and this is sad and ironic at the same
time.
We end up with a fastidious question: are contemporary works
of art (despite the artists’ intentions) basically the prototypes, the
exemplification and representation of strategies to create value in
capitalistic society?
It could be so, and it would be not too bad in the balance, because
an artwork can still deliver a precious service to society: it can spread
positive principles and messages to millions of visitors to museums,
biennials, galleries, etc., and improve the sense of (global) community.
An artwork can also provide comfort to the one fortunate enough
to have the means to possess it, furnishing a sense of belonging
to a (global) intellectual elite, it can function as status symbol, as

88.   https://www.sothebysinstitute.com/news-and-events/news/5-major-mo-
ments-art-market-history.
89. Neil Cummings. A Joy Forever. Joy Forever: The Political Economy of Social
Creativity.
90. Pierre Bourdieu. Symbolic capital and social classes. Collège de France, France.
1977.
25
inspiration for youth, a fluidifier of social relations as well as form of
speculation and investment. A really good commodity indeed, but it
still remains an open problem.

VII

THE TWISTER. - It is likely already clear at this point that

the contemporary artwork’s specificity derives from the unique,
intertwined double value-form it acquires. It seems the doubled value
form defines the artwork. The inflationary doubling embodiment of
two forms of value is expressed during the perception of an artwork
and constitutes its own specific feature as an object and special kind of
commodity. The expression of equivalent-value form as an auratically
framed embodiment of both a society’s transcendental cultural forces
and the value-form linked to the commodities system creates a sort
of double object: a special intertwined idiosyncratic object called the
contemporary artwork.
Consequential fetishism and the production of fantasies specific
to artworks (the promise of the satisfaction of needs and desires)
are the direct outcome of these intertwined value-forms. The work
of art assumed a traditionally equivalent-value form linked to the
transcendental higher organizational, dynamic structure of a society
codified metonymically, symbolically, allegorically, etc. When this
special status became doubled through commodification, the art object
acquired a central cultural position and became the exemplification
of the totality of the social sphere, precisely because it contained the
double link to abstract concepts of an entire (today wanna-be global)
culture and the link to all the other commodities. The tension within
the contemporary artwork is always Janus-faced, 91split between the
garbage, as a reflection of the (never ending) consumeristic process
and the mystical salvation, teleological, and holy as the direction
suggested by abstract transcendental values.92At once eschatological
and scatological, Manzoni’s merda d’artista is archetypical in this sense.
This specificity releases the artwork from the suspicion of being only a

91. Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture.
2009.
92. Sebastian Egenhofer, Time, Money, and Matter: Aesthetic Materality Today.
2013.
26
sort of prototype for better commodities or an exemplification of the
creation of the form of labor power.
The accused is free, but not really. The contemporary art
market’s need to produce objects of speculation, collection, and trade
inevitably collides with the vital need for artworks to not simply
become puppets in the machine. If artists want to not be obsolete in
their own production, they must define the way their work operates
temporally. 93Otherwise, the artwork will be immediately subjugated
by the apparatus of the technical and the mass-media as configurator
of the world where the artwork is supposed to function and to be
perceived. This is the direct consequence of the idea that it is no longer
the subject who creates their own world and the artwork somehow
coincides with that. This modernist utopia is obsolete: the capitalistic/
technological apparatus substitutes the subject and cannot be ignored
before production. Before production, artists simply need to consider
the streams and storms where the artwork, in the best scenario, will
navigate. At the same time, they have to be aware of the wood the
boat is made. The nature of an artwork is transcendental because
it’s not only irreducible to its own materiality, but also ontologically
constituted by open relations between embodied concepts and the very
phenomenological experience of the beholder in connection with the
historicity of the context where the artwork is exposed.
In the battle to free themselves, the first generation of
conceptual artists failed to avoid commodification as they failed to de-
materialize their artworks, but indeed they started the never-ending
fight that became contemporary art. The core problematic aspect
revealed by the Benjamin’s failure is synthesized in a question: if the
artwork’s auratic components reproduce reactionary forces, how can
we preserve its emancipatory forces and creative power? We learned
that the medium is not the issue because it cannot be the solution: all
media including texts, photography, films, and performances can be
easily reified as demonstrated over the last 60 years. Contemporary
art showed the different possibilities adopted to commodify artworks.
In short, how can the possibility be revealed for a piece of matter also
to be a sort of portal, a difficult access road to the fertile conceptual-
phenomenological experiences the artwork, in a fragile way, implicitly

93.  
Ibid.
27
carries? In this sense, the precious treasure is the shared experience itself
in time, and for that there is no need for authors’ names, no need for
provenance, no need for authentication only effectiveness that indeed
also requires a special kind of patient, informed, and good-willing
beholder—quite a rare one. We land again in the field of old-fashioned
use-value.

28
29
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