excerpt
Foreword (p. 7-8)
© Sternberg Press, the authors
With the publication of Diedrich Diederichsen's essay on (surplus) value in art, Witte de With Publishers and Sternberg Press inaugurate a new book series: Reflections. Why this series now? We rarely see the long thematic essay in print – an in-depth consideration of specific but far-reaching themes that prove fundamental to our changing culture. At stake in this publishing adventure is just this type of essay. Each text will be published in its original language – to capture all the idiomatic nuances of the author's arguments – as well as in English and Dutch – to extend its imagined community of readers. “Reflections” is meant to encapsulate this process as both the result of a particular thinking, and the root of further rumination and debate.To begin, we have chosen the question of surplus value, or more specifically Mehrwert. This German term, which finds close correspondence in the Dutch meerwaarde but is rather difficult to translate fully into English, points to the exceptional commodity status that is often ascribed to the function of art in society. Needless to say, reflection on Mehrwert also afforded us a way of weighing in on the current debates about art and its markets, of distilling these debates to what we consider to be their most basic question.
For our guest author, we chose Diedrich Diederichsen, in whom we have always found an agile cultural critic – one who defies categorization, yet maintains a firm grasp on the various disciplines he combines, including the philosophy of Karl Marx. We knew that while Diederichsen would get us back to this ‘source' of economic thinking, he would also initiate original, even controversial, conclusions about systemic forces at play in our world. In his essay, Diederichsen applies the Marxist theory of surplus value (Mehrwert) to rationalize value formation in
contemporary art, in sly defiance of the invocation of art's “extra special” quality (which, ironically, is also implied in the colloquial use of Mehrwert) as a substitute for serious discussion on the subject. He then goes on to elaborate on art under the law of the “commodity form” and on the notion
of “aura” that applies to this. Continuing to operate in contradistinction to received wisdom, he accounts for aura regardless of the specific material constitution and uniqueness of an art object. Yet (perhaps paradoxically) he preserves the notion of the art object as “index”. Here too contemporary art's condition of reproducibility acquires crucial nuance. The final chapter compares contemporary art to other cultural industries, such as music and film, which are firmly under the sway of digital reproductive economies yet, unlike contemporary art, are experiencing diminishing possibilities for the creation of surplus value. Diedrich Diederichsen's text offers provocative resolutions to the question of value in art that are ripe for debate. Especially in his final paragraphs, where the “special case” of contemporary art is dealt
a set of disturbing predictions about the shifting cultural values that attend the economic ones.Choosing an idiomatic term such as Mehrwert as the first subject of reflection for our series has made the task of translation especially challenging and we are grateful to James Gussen and Els Struiving for their skillful problem solving, as well as to Zoë Gray (English); Ariadne Urlus, Nathalie Hartjes, Belinda Hak, Kordelia Nitsch (Dutch); and Eva Huttenlauch with Tatjana Günthner (German) for their attentive reviews of the manuscripts. Our greatest thanks go to Diedrich Diederichsen for rising to the occasion
with a readiness for dialogue and his signature sense of down-to-earth luminescence.
Nicolaus Schafhausen, Caroline Schneider, Monika Szewczyk
