ABSTRACT
ACLASS I CAL V I EW o f the industrial economy as ‘production-distribution con-sumption’ is not unhelpful in appreciating the world of so-called high art. Marcel Duchamp (1973: 47), as much as any informed commentator, recognized that the artist (creator) and spectator (consumer) were embedded as part of a circular process: ‘In the final analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of art history.’ Complementing this ‘flow-of-exchanges’ outlook, one can turn to the role of relationships, as artist and critic Martha Rosler (1997: 20-1, n.1) does, in articulating the various stakeholders (also called actors or players) constituting the ‘high art world’:
I am taking the art world as the changing international group of commercial and non-profit galleries, museums, study centers, and associated venues and the individuals who own, run, direct, and toil in them; the critics, reviewers, and historians, and their publications, who supply the studies, rationales, publicity, and explanations; the connoisseurs and collectors who form the nucleus of sales and appreciation; plus the artists living and recently dead who supply the goods.
