The Product Worlds of Art

Artworks may technically be commodities, but they are fundamentally distinct from the vast world of consumer goods that surround them—this, at least, is the widely shared sentiment of artists, critics, curators, and historians alike. And yet the art system is littered with products: from derivative museum merchandise to fashion and lifestyle objects made by artists, from numbered editions and posters to multiples—not to mention the myriad vernacular objects circulating outside the normative art market. Whether as originals, licenses, counterfeits, or hybrid mutations thereof, the consumer product looms over today’s global production and circulation of art—so why are art history and the museum hesitant to pay attention to it at the level of reception?

This session welcomes presentations featuring art products from across the global 20th and 21st centuries, with the aim of identifying key conceptual issues in the two-fold challenge: to theorize art objects as consumer goods and/or consumer products as kinds of art. From questions of originality and authorship to the numerous politics of manufacturing and marketing things as “art,” the session convenes around the clear sense that, in consumerist terms, art is not (just a kind of) design—though it may be haunted by its modes of enterprise. The session welcomes case studies that show how this simple distinction leads systems of art to generate their own vast range of consumer goods—objects that, while rarely rendered precious, may reach the lives of many more people than “real” artworks ever will.