Russell Smith has some great musings on the value of art in the Globe and Mail. His thoughts are launched by the recent theft from the Munch Museum in Oslo. ‘The Scream,’ specifically, has no market value (since it can’t really be sold), has no bragging value, since any collector that has it can’t show it publicly, and hasn’t been put up for ransom. Says Smith:
Objects only have monetary worth because we say they do, and, more importantly, both sides of a transaction must agree that they do: Paper money is the clearest example of this consensual symbolism, since it has no intrinsic value. It is a contract. But then nothing really does have intrinsic value — even gold is more valuable than silver only because we have agreed to say that it is.
Rarity increases value only because of convention. A rare stamp can be worth thousands, even though it is useless, not necessarily beautiful and made of paper, simply because it benefits both seller and buyer to imagine it as a vessel for value — rather like a bank note. And the value assigned to it is the result of a negotiation that is fundamentally arbitrary.
So value is a social construct, which we always knew. But the keys to understanding that construction seem essential to any manager or steward of cultural artifacts or expressions.
In a comic twist on the same story and subject, The Onion parody newspaper recently offered the following news brief:
‘The Scream’ Poster Stolen from Area Dorm Room
ST. PAUL, MN‹Concordia University campus police are still investigating Tuesday’s theft of a poster of Edvard Munch’s The Scream from an area dorm room. ‘We’re doing everything in our power to recover the poster,’ officer Donald Benson said of the poster, which was stolen while the two residents of 204 Walther Hall were studying in the second-floor common area. ‘With its iconic contorted human figure beneath a swirling red sky, The Scream is a masterpiece of German expressionism, and the poster was valued at $7.95.’ The work of art is one of only 86 copies known to exist on the campus.
