Art and power: how value is made

Cultural tourists today still plot journeys to cities like Florence, Rome, Vienna and Paris, just as they have done for centuries. More recently, we have added destinations like London and New York. It is not a coincidence that they have all been, or still are, powerful political and commercial centres. The cultural elites which have adjudicated standards in art for centuries have grown out of these places. And they have created institutions in these places which continue to exert their very extensive legacies and create new ones.

The art that we see in major collections around the world is therefore an expression of the acquired taste of successive dominant but minority groups. There have been many attempts to subvert that tendency. Have any succeeded? Does it even matter if they haven’t? Do we need quantifiable standards in art at all? Or do they simply justify the financial investments at stake in public and private collections around the world? If value in art isn’t about money and status, then can we have a shared sense of its value?

Vexing questions present themselves in our experience of the art of the past and the present and we will seek strategies to answer them.