The Value of Things

Part beautiful artists book, part critical text The Value of Things is the result of over five years research, facilitated by unprecedented access to the British Museum and Selfridges Department Store.

To live in a modern city, is to live in an environment described by an astonishing array of things. Growing mountain of clothes, tools, art, gifts, information, souvenirs, electronic technology and rubbish are piling up around us. Objects are inserted into, and spill out of every shelf, cupboard, display case, shop, home, gallery, museum, magazine, computer monitor and landfill site. Surrounded by a complex mesh of competing 'product narratives' that dispute ownership, contest interpretation, and disagree on value, these vast accumulations of objects are the means by which we make ourselves and our world knowable.

Events in the previous century which led to this daunting state of accumulation, unfolded as the end-game of a revolution which had begun in the nineteenth century. The giant engines of European industralisation that initiated the material avalanche of the modern age necessitated the evolution of massive institutions to both structure and display the energy of production through things.

The Value of Things sets out to explore the narratives of two institutions which perfectly represent the awesome technologies for sourcing, transportation, warehousing, accounting, stocking, display and redistribution of material things. The greatest inventions of modernity, these institutions are the most privileged sites within the social organisation of all objects, images, signs and services: the department store and the public museum.

Although clearly organised around different economic drives, what the department store shares with the museum is the encyclopaedic desire to render the whole world knowable, classified and displayed for the visitor to consume. If the museum inherited its collection and core practices from the previous aristocracy, its driven by a set of values and narratives to protect an image of singularity through souvenirs of the past. In simple contrast, the store holds the promise of a semiotic democracy, played out live amongst the profusion of the present.

But The Value of Things is not merely a task of mourning - it tracks the narrative of the museum and the store through into the newly-diffused territories of the digital age. As we enter the first decade of the new millennium, our traditional play with value has exceeded its previous limits. A principle of value based on the expression of accumulated excess, has far less relevance in electronically connected economies.

While the department store and museum act as a model to structure and narrate previous attitudes towards things, they are also caught in a process of radical transformation - they may even be accelerating towards a strange convergence.

As the store is superseded by out-of-town shopping cities, or its convenience challenged by the point-and-click of e-commerce, the ruthless forces of commerce are subsumed under an image of public service and spectacle. The store becomes a tourist destination dispersed amongst other cultural sites. In turn, as an effect of changes in both public provision and the constitution of its visiting audience, the museum has been forced to aggressively market and license its own collection. Those stored old things, are harnessed as potential new revenue streams via tiers of licensed commercial access. The museum is evolving as a 'brand', competing to control the flow of value through things, as its objects merge with a wider culture of exhibition, our most unique artifacts become seamlessely integrated into the retail present.

224 pages 17 x 23.5cm full colour

to read a review
College Art Association Reviews

to buy from Birkhauser or Amazon