The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Judging the Value of Art

Art Monthly panel debate Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Saturday October 8 2005

How is art judged in the present anti-aesthetic, yet post-theoretical times? Who judges the value of art - the collector, the dealer, the curator or the critic? Art Monthly critics Dave Beech, JJ Charlesworth, Jonathan Harris and Sarah James met to debate the relationship between criticism and the art market and what this means for the formation of critical judgements about art.

Read the features in Art Monthly which inspired this panel discussion by clicking on the links below.

Art's Debunkers
Dave Beech goes head to head with Julian Stallabrass over the arguments Stallabrass puts forward in his new book Art Incorporated, The Story of Contemporary Art.

Here we find the debunker's full range of complaints. Artists are either cynical or niave, curators are calculating, dealers, sponsors and collectors follow the money, art writers are largely academic, and the political support of culture is a threat to art itself. Published in February 2005, no283.
Read Art's Debunkers

Art's Monied Parties
Julian Stallabrass on the importance of a good kness up to the art economy.
The important point here is that the circuits of art, and the money that flows with it, are also circuits of discourse between favoured members of an elite, and that those events at which they circulate and talk are venues for the creation and confirmation of value. Lacking many of the formal features of a functioning market, parties are central to the art economy. Published in May 2005, no286.
Read Art's Monied Parties

The Ethics of Aesthetics
Sarah James on the possiblity of a radical aesthetics.
There has been much talk of the possibilities of a newly radicalised aesthetics in recent Leftist discourses under the banner of 'new aestheticism' whose writers are united in their objective to challenge the hegemony of anti-aesthetic theoretical writing and recapture the particularities of aesthetic interpretation. Clearly, central to the Left's engagement with, refusal of, or recuperation of the aesthetic is the possibility of construing a dialectical conception of aesthetic autonomy. Published in March 2005, no284.
Read The Ethics of Aesthetics