Relative Values

in what circumstances art is valued. Complementing a major six-part BBC TV series, this illustrated guide also examines ideas about artists, the art market, art collectors, and more, from around the world during various time periods.

A lively and contentious companion book to a six-part BBC television series that probes the question ``Why do we value art so highly?'' In clipped, sound-bite style, the authors examine the mechanisms of power that give fine art its metaphoric and economic glamour: critics, museums, auction houses, collectors, and the mass media. Buck is a journalist with art-historical training; Dodd edits a film and television journal, Sight and Sound. Graphically, they've given the book a visual noise worthy of MTV: The text is set near boldface and photographs and quotes fashion implied ironies. Smart art-historical revisionism doubles as pop-culture critique as the authors cite Kirk Douglas's depiction of Vincent Van Gogh in Vincente Minelli's 1956 film Lust for Life to skewer the more serious biographical stereotype of the ``artist-as- genius.'' Elsewhere the authors speak of museums as creators and guardians of the ``present orthodoxy,'' enshriners of status-quo social values. They cite figures like David Rockefeller, formerly chairman of the Museum of Modern Art and currently chairman emeritus, to demonstrate that art collecting is a ``byword for power,'' in other words, that art, allegedly a spiritual good, is intimately tied to material wealth. Disparate artists are examined for their skills in politicized public manipulation, including Jacques Louis David, Jackson Pollock, Leon Golub, Jenny Holzer, and Jeff Koons. Throughout, the authors raise good, tough questions. Their answers, doggedly polemical, have less bite. They arrive at the unsurprising conclusion that ``art, its meaning and value, are made, unmade and remade throughout history.'' Pointed British brattiness and cut-up compositional verve give this book style points. A thin volume, it ends--happily--before it runs out of gas. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.