Current Issue

3.8 / Without Price and With(out) Worth

February 2, 2012. How do we measure the intrinsic worth of objects? How do we stack up material value against the agency and power an object purportedly holds? In our conversation with Steven Leiber, whose loss we are only beginning to feel, he notes the genesis of his collection of artist ephemera as “just twenty-one boxes of crap.” That frank assessment echoes across Matthew Rana’s essay, in which—citing Baudrillard—he offers that objects “demonstrate their autonomy irrationally, through ambivalence and seduction.” We’ve all felt the irrational seduction of objects, even in an era, as Julia Glosemeyer notes, that’s “infatuated with the concept of immateriality.” In a week where we’ve received news of the deaths of three significant figures in the art world—Leiber, Mike Kelley, and Dorothea Tanning—the idea that there is a universe populated exclusively of objects, one that does not privilege our relationship to them but their relationships to each other, has a sense of permanence that might explain our ambivalence and our attraction. We are not immortal, but aspire to find what is. –PM.