The pleasure of expense: Mauss and The Gift in contemporary art

Mauss’s The Gift has captured the imagination of generations of artists. As artistic practice shifted from the production of objects to the mediation of situations of social exchange, Mauss’s focus on the ‘pleasure of expense’ has been central, from Bataille and the situationists to relational aesthetics. In most of these cases, Mauss’s arguments were used to question the market economy in ways rather more radical than he himself would have done. However, my objective in this article is not to criticize how Mauss has been misunderstood, but to show how his work has opened a field of new possibilities in art theory and practice.