ABSTRACT

Opened in 1903, the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum (in Hagen, Germany) was the first museum of modern art in the world. It is also the only museum to be run explicitly on rubbish theory principles, which helps explain why, to mark its centenary, it republished my book Rubbish Theory (Thompson, 1979) in a new German translation by the museum's director, Michael Fehr. Rubbish Theory sets out to answer the question that economics, you might think, would have answered but hasn't: how does something second-hand become an antique; how does a rat-infested slum become part of Our Glorious Heritage? My argument will be that, by rectifying this omission on the part of economics we can clarify and resolve some serious problems with the concept of scarcity. The basic idea is that there are two mutually exclusive cultural categories that are ‘socially imposed’ on the world of objects: a transient category (the members of which have decreasing value and finite expected lifespans) and a durable category (the members of which have increasing value and infinite expected lifespans). If these two categories exhausted the material world then the transfer of an object from one to the other would not be possible (because of the mutual contradiction of the categories' defining criteria). But, of course, they are not exhaustive; they only encompass those objects that are valued, leaving a vast and disregarded realm — rubbish — that, it turns out, provides the one-way route from transience to durability (see Figure 7.1). Hence Michael Fehr's nice insight that there are just two destinations: the rubbish tip and the museum. Once produced, a transient object will decline in value and in expected lifespan, eventually reaching zero on both. In an ideal (for some, at any rate) world it would then, having reached the end of its usefulness, disappear in a cloud of dust. But often this does not happen; it lingers on in a valueless and timeless limbo (rubbish) until, perhaps, it is ‘discovered’ by some creative and upwardly mobile individual and transferred across into the durable category. 1