The student is instructed to read Douglas Crimp’s essay ‘The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism’ on the oca student website. I downloaded a copy from the UCA Library which is accessible by students via the OCA Learn site.
Crimp posits that Walter Benjamin saw the aura of early photography not in the work of the technicians who captured the image, but in the sitter, the individual whose image was being captured. The simple act of the process of containing reality and realism within a frame by a chemical process allowed the photograph to have authenticity and therefore an aura.
Crimp allows that the mechanical process of capture and reproduction of an image has in itself culturally devalued the image, it has however not devalued the original, in fact, the more copies there are, the more valuable the original becomes. He then goes on to describe how although by the 1980s museums and gallery’s considered photography as art, there was resistance amongst some to photography as art and that mechanical reproduction was a threat to painting as art as it was decaying the aura of originality and reality itself. For if photographs have an aura, then they have a capitalistic value when hanging in a gallery space.
But how does a photograph gain a monetary value in the postmodern age, who decides the value of one mechanically created image over another? For me, the answer starts with the gallery and the museum itself; the vintage print. Due to the variability of the chemical process and the fragility of some of the plates and processes, early photographic images have a certain rarity. It is with the curator or collector that the real value lies, which images attract the eye of the collector or as Crimp describes them ‘the connoisseur’. Like the wine collector, the rarity and the aesthetic are where the value lies, no wine connoisseur would cellar a wine that tastes bad, and so the art connoisseur looks for the image which pleases their eye, in doing so, they create a monetary value in the print.
Crimp provides a good example of this in his essay “The museum’s old, the library’s new subject”, (Visual Culture, pp213-223) regarding the looting of books that contained images of Egypt taken by Francis Frith. These Victorian images were originally published in books and these books were ripped apart and the images reframed and hung on gallery and museum walls. Of course, this obfuscates Benjamin’s concept that the original would have more value than the copy, here, Frith’s work which had already been mechanically repeated through the printing process was taken from the copies format and reinserted into the galley and art via the curator or collector.
With this in mind, I turned my attention to the websites linked with the exercise. After looking at the images on https://aftersherrielevine.com/ and https://www.afterwalkerevans.com/index.html
I understood part of the point that Sherie Levine was making, by rephotographing Walker Evans original images of 1930s sharecroppers and then presenting the images freely, openly and with full instructions on how to turn the digital print into a gallery compatible object, they were questioning where the inherent value of the print is. Is the print value because it was created by Walker Evens, is its value that it was rephotographed by Levine, or is the value in the final print when it hangs in the gallery. Certainly, the digital image freely available has little value, once it has been hung it enters the realm of the connoisseur and the gallery space grants the image monetary value, it turns from free to commercial by where the physical print resides.
Whilst examining the websites I was interested to see if anyone had actually tried to create some economic value from these images via NFTs,
NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) are a new concept where people attempt to own an image via a computer generated blockchain linked to the value of computer-generated blockchain cryptocurrency, in this case, NFTs are linked to Etherium. NFTs allow people to procure digital art in a digital format as a speculative asset, in the hope that their blockchain version of the artwork becomes valuable in the future.
I was unsurprised to find that images from both sites were being traded on the NFT market at the eyewatering price of $678.66 (at that point in time) as someone had downloaded a copy of the image, generated a blockchain value and attempted to sell the blockchain on the open market.
Here an attempt has been made to take the digital file and create value to a version of it, the NFT owner would not hold copyright on the image but would hold an electronic receipt which stated that they “owned” that particular digital version with that particular blockchain attached. There are no measures to prevent someone from copying the image and then printing it freely of themselves.
I can believe that some of the value attributed to some art is the contextual value of the physical item, taken out of context the art could lose cultural, social, and economic value, but as a digital item may gain cultural and social relevance without a capital value attached to it.
Reference list
Clark, M. (2021). NFTs, Explained. [online] The Verge. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/22310188/nft-explainer-what-is-blockchain-crypto-art-faq.
Conti, R. (2021). What You Need To Know About Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). [online] Forbes Advisor UK. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/uk/advisor/investing/nft-non-fungible-token/.
Evans, J. and Hall, S. (1999). Visual culture : the reader. London ; Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications In Association With The Open University, pp.213–223.
Levine, S. (n.d.). AfterSherrieLevine.com. [online] aftersherrielevine.com. Available at: https://aftersherrielevine.com/.
Museum, T.M. (2020). The Great Pyramid and The Great Sphinx. [online] Metmuseum.org. Available at: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/286141.
Ness, C. (2008). 10.29.2008 – He who steals my artwork steals . . . what, exactly? [online] http://www.berkeley.edu. Available at: https://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2008/10/29_artwork.shtml [Accessed 21 Mar. 2022].
North’s, A. (2015). Postmodernism Explained. [online] Owlcation. Available at: https://owlcation.com/humanities/Postmodernism-Explained.
OpenSea (n.d.). After Sherrie Levine After Walker Evans – On the Medium. [online] OpenSea. Available at: https://opensea.io/assets/matic/0x2953399124f0cbb46d2cbacd8a89cf0599974963/47703271153577773829494557470062363809075258213751833516469772735641926238210 [Accessed 21 Mar. 2022].
Leonard Contextual Studies 