Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Value and Valuation in Art and Culture: Introduction and Overview
- PART ONE ORIGINS OF MEANING
- PART TWO THE CREATION OF VALUE IN ARTISTIC WORK
- PART THREE CONTINUITY AND INNOVATION
- PART FOUR APPRECIATION AND RANKING
- PART FIVE CULTURAL POLICIES
- 15 What Values Should Count in the Arts? The Tension between Economic Effects and Cultural Value
- 16 The Public Value of Controversial Art: The Case of the Sensation Exhibit
- 17 Going to Extremes: Commercial and Nonprofit Valuation in the U.S. Arts System
- Index
- Plate section
- Plate section
- References
16 - The Public Value of Controversial Art: The Case of the Sensation Exhibit
from PART FIVE - CULTURAL POLICIES
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Value and Valuation in Art and Culture: Introduction and Overview
- PART ONE ORIGINS OF MEANING
- PART TWO THE CREATION OF VALUE IN ARTISTIC WORK
- PART THREE CONTINUITY AND INNOVATION
- PART FOUR APPRECIATION AND RANKING
- PART FIVE CULTURAL POLICIES
- 15 What Values Should Count in the Arts? The Tension between Economic Effects and Cultural Value
- 16 The Public Value of Controversial Art: The Case of the Sensation Exhibit
- 17 Going to Extremes: Commercial and Nonprofit Valuation in the U.S. Arts System
- Index
- Plate section
- Plate section
- References
Summary
All the others translate: the painter sketches
A visible world to love or reject;
Rummaging into his living, the poet fetches
The images out that hurt and connect.
W. H. Auden, “The Composer”Introduction
There is probably no point at which the cultural value of art is brought more clearly into public view than when art creates a scandal. This is nothing new. In 1815, for example, Goya's Nude Maja (La Maja Desnuda) created a public stir that landed the artist in front of the Spanish Inquisition, where he was forced to answer charges of obscenity. The work, today considered an icon of cultural value, was deemed culturally destructive by some authorities at the time.
Similar controversies about cultural value erupt periodically to this day. Over the past 20 years, scandals have erupted on numerous occasions in the United States, in which government funds have gone to subsidize the production or exhibition of art considered by some to be obscene, blasphemous, or offensively unpatriotic. The resulting value clashes between opponents and supporters of the offending art have constituted battles in America's so-called culture wars between one group that is traditional, conservative, and religious, and the other that is permissive, liberal, and secular (Himmelfarb 1999).
There are few better examples of a battle over the cultural value of art than the infamous Sensation exhibit at New York City's Brooklyn Museum of Art.
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- Information
- Beyond PriceValue in Culture, Economics, and the Arts, pp. 270 - 282Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007