ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with considerations of the value of works regarded as juvenilia or as amateur and how this compares with and draws attention to the values of ‘things past’ or things ‘outmoded’. It turns to focus on lessons that can be learnt from the work of artist Elizabeth Price, whose video ‘K’ might remind us of how we fetishise the past as an object, along with any object of the past. Detailed exploration of this work eventually focuses on a device that the writer comes to think of as a ‘history machine’ as well as the peculiarity of its products – sheer stockings – as signifiers of the fetishisation (and even classic status) of the past, the vintage, the antique and the retro.
