Art, Economy, and the Differentiation of Value

In: Alternatives: global, local, political, Band 21, Heft 4, S. 419-437

Abstract

The question of value comes to the fore in early modernity with the delineation of the distinct discursive fields of economics, ethics, and aesthetics, and their respective development into the self-sufficient practical forms of economic rationality, private morality, and modern art. Lying as it does at the intersection of the modern subject's internal world of needs and desires and the external world of the sources of their gratification or deferral, value begins to assume a considerable importance. Although the three realms of value co-emerge as differentiated with the inauguration of modernity, and each has been accompanied by a discourse concerned to elaborate its own autonomy and self-referentiality, they nevertheless stand in a complex relation to one another to define themselves mutually in a crisscrossing network of relations.