At a recent sale at Christie's auction house, Andreas Gursky's photograph, Rhein II, sold for a record $4.3 million. The photograph, and some comments, are after the fold.
As is frequently discussed in my aesthetics classes, there is a complex relationship between the market value of an artwork and its aesthetic value. Does the fact that this photograph has sold for more than any other entail that it has more aesthetic value than any other? The obvious answer, or at least my students’ initial answer, is a resounding “NO!” After discussing the institutional theory of art as argued for by George Dickie, Arthur Danto, and others, they begin to see that the relationship is more complex. A market participant in the art world, for instance, has powerful market incentives to “know” more about the artworks they peddle than non-participants (a category which, alas, includes most of my students and myself). It is the authority and selections of these market-makers, so to speak, which differentiates what is and is not art. There is also the important role of art critics who can provide a legitimizing voice to the aesthetic value of a work. Clement Greenberg’s essays provide a classic case in point. In his famous essay “Modernist Painting,” for example, Greenberg draws upon Kant to give authority to works such as Jackson Pollock’s (whose work Greenberg avidly promoted). As Kant’s critical project sought to point out when our uses of reason exceeded its proper limits, so too did Greenberg feel that the attempts to use paint to represent a three-dimensional scene on a two-dimensional canvas was a violation of painting’s proper limits. Jackson Pollock’s modernist painting fully embraces and paints within its proper limits – it embraces the flatness of paint on a canvas.
As for Gursky’s photograph, there is no doubt a complex, institutional story that could be brought in to support the aesthetic and market value of the photograph. In a statement from Christie’s auction house, for instance, they call upon the authority of Plato: “The viewer is not invited to consider a specific place along the river but rather an almost ‘platonic’ ideal of the body of water as it navigates the landscape.” Then there’s the world of photography itself, with the comparative social and cultural capital of various “well-known” photographers, a world I know little about, which also needs to be brought in. Regardless of the story that could be told, I think it’s an excellent $4.3 million photograph.
UPDATE: Here is the photograph 99 Cent. Lisa Shapiro refers to below (comment #7):
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