Dave Beech: Art and Value - Art's Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics

Dave Beech: Art and Value - Art's Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics Dave Beech, Art and Value: Art's Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics, Brill, 2015, 392pp, ¤139.00, 978 9 0042881 4 0.

Art and Value examines art's economic exceptionalism through the theoretical frameworks of classical, neoclassical and Marxist economics in order to question the established wisdom on art's relationship to capitalism. Dave Beech contends that there is a peculiar convergence in the pronouncements by both mainstream economics and Marxist cultural analysis that 'art is, always has been, or has recently become nothing but a commodity'. Beech's wager is that this assumed certainty of art's commodification is all too often simply asserted rather than 'sufficiently tested'.

Art is a surprisingly effective optic through which to envision the discipline(s) of economics and its limits - ie what is exceptional to it - as Beech previously explored in his article 'The Art Anomaly' (AM370). Classical economists such as Adam Smith, Beech observes, 'establish economic laws, in part, by showing what is exempt from them, and art is one of the key exceptions'. Neoclassical economics, however, could be characterised as a version of what Mark Fisher terms capitalist realism: the attempt to rationalise...