Jean-Philippe ANTOINE
Nancy Shaver : Retail. Invention, value, art
A recent exhibition entitled “retail”, by American artist Nancy Shaver, placed next to her installations, assemblages and sculptures, some objects taken from the thrift shop she’s been running for more than a decade. This juxtaposition showed extravagant differences between the objects’ selling prices. The ways through which the value of these artworks is constructed is to be considered in detail here, as well as their critical effects on the public concepts of art and on the commercial circulation of art.

Sophie CRAS
Form the value of the artwork to the market price : Yves Klein as seen through an economic analysis
On January 2nd 1957, at Apollinaire gallery of Milan, Yves Klein opens the exhibition of eleven perfectly identical blue monochromes that – was he to pretend later – are put up to sale at various prices. Wo is however, the most arbitrary in the fixation of prices between the artist and the market ? Two matters intermingle here : one theoretical is concerned by the scholarly case proposed by Klein and regards the valuation and evaluation of a “multiple” work of art as seen through economic thinking about the notion of value. The other in a more historical fashion will examine the fate of these series of works on the market.

Julie VERLAINE
Good to throw away, and as such priceless ? Exhibiting rubbish in art galleries in the sixties
By studying exhibition catalogues texts related to the Nouveaux Réalistes group – texts written in the sixties by critics and merchants – one notices founding arguments about the symbolic value of these works. While putting forward the necessity of finding new criteria for art appreciation, critics and merchants have at first separated the value of an artwork from the quality of its materials, in order to emphasize afterwards the practice of these artists as being particularly relevant to the context of the industrial and market-driven society of theses years. 

Jacinto LAGEIRA
Transvaluation and invaluation
“Aesthetic capitalism” and the “liberal cultural revolution” put forward a relativism of value, an “anything goes” that allows the transformation of any work of art into a piece of merchandise likely to be exchanged according to the “deregulated” rules of the market. It is now necessary to think of an axiology that would make use of the concept of value in an open understanding, i.e. that would find again the connections between supposed-to-be and fact. One shall make use of the notion of value in a practical-moral way which – while introducing an utilitarian use value, cannot be reduced to it if it maintains its immaterial value. There can’t be a dichotomy of facts ad values, because the meanings we give to facts and to values are linked together by semantics’ double entity : material as well as immaterial. 

Gabriel GEE
Instrumental value and resistance value in Northern England contemporary art
Since the end of World War II, the great conurbations of Northern England have experienced the decline of their traditional industries. Their reactivation, according to the conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, was thought to be necessarily passing through a valuing of entrepreneurship, managerial efficiency and markets laws. Contemporary art practices of theses regions have been confronted to this process of deindustrialisation and redynamising. Starting with the arrival of “neoliberal” politics at the beginning of the eighties, we’ll address the connections between “instrumental” and “resisting” values in the production and distribution of the arts of northern England. Of the nineties are marked by a hegemony of the intrumental value over a value of resistance is it not possible however to envision in this beginning of 21st century, the emergence of a more autonomous and regional exploitation of this instrumental value ? 

Marc LENOT
Construction and denial of any value : the example of Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý
Miroslav Tichý, at first considered an “outsider”, has since the beginning of the new millennium been recognized as a contemporary artist. The analysis of texts that witness this reversal of fortune reveals six parameters in the valuation of his work : the character itself, his experimental apprenticeship, the sociopolitical context of his practice, the subject of his photographs and his process of artistic production. These six parameters are used in various proportions, whether the artist is to be considered against the background of “art brut” or within the field of contemporary art. 


 

Léo MARTINEZ
 The role of the exhibition in the valuation of photography : The example of the Printemps de Cahors and “photographie plasticienne”
At the beginning of the nineties contemporary photography becoming successful again; a phenomenon that can be seen in the organization of a number of distribution means and in the burgeoning and success of exhibitions such as the Printemps de Cahors, after 1991. This example leads to an investigation about how the exibition process leads to a legitimization and increase of value, not only of certain artists, but also of a group of practices, even of a medium. In order to be able to grasp the idea of “photographie plasticienne”, one needs to historicize it, which means minimizing its legitimizing discourse by pointing the fact it has meaning only in relation to a specific state of the art world.