Schwarz
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Many years ago Meyer Schapiro argued that there was a radical difference between art’s spiritual value and its commercial value. He warned against the nihilistic effect of collapsing their difference. I will argue that today, in the public mind, and perhaps in the unconscious of many artists, there is no difference. The commercial value of art has usurped its spiritual value [i would say use value], indeed, seems to determine it. Art’s esthetic, cognitive, emotional and moral value -- its value for the dialectical varieties of critical consciousness -- has been subsumed by the value of money.
Art has never been independent of money, but now it has become a dependency of money. Consciousness of money is all-pervasive. It informs art -- virtually everything in capitalist society -- the way Absolute Spirit once did, as Hegel thought. Money has always invested in art, as though admiring, even worshipping, what it respected as its superior -- the true treasure of civilization -- but today money’s hyper-investment in art, implicitly an attempt to overwhelm it, to force it to surrender its supposedly higher values [thus neutralizing all art and artists functioning in service to the system], strongly suggests that money regards itself as superior to art.