PARSE Journal Issue # 2 The Value of Contemporary Art

This issue of PARSE sheds light on the ways in which art’s market and operational conditions produce and distribute regimes of value. Measurement of any value (cultural, aesthetic or monetary) in the arts tends to be occasional, anecdotal, and disparate. Indeed, proposals to introduce systemic analysis and measurement into contemporary art are often treated with suspicion by those who oppose art’s regulation as yet another infringement of accountability to metrics that, so it is supposed, would deny the idea that art’s value is immeasurable. As with production in other artistic disciplines — theatre, music, dance, design, each of which has distinctively organ- ised nancial support systems — visual arts in Euro-American societies relies on the idea of intrinsic cultural value and, as with the other artistic disciplines, is deeply affected by the on-going decreases in public funding over the last four decades, marking a significant transformation in the once cherished notion that artistic value was indeed non-measurable. How does the economic and subjective transformation of the past forty years affect concepts of value in the arts? And how might an analysis of arts’ nancing change the core concepts of value?