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Sophie Cras The Artist as Economist: Art and Capitalism in the 1960s Trans Malcolm DeBevoise New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. 244 pp.; 50 color ills.; 35 b/w ills.; 85 ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300232707)
The 1960s are often art historicized as a period when artists began to shift their practices away from materiality and toward forms of abstract thought. According to the economist-turned-art-historian Sophie Cras, it also turns out to have been a decade when financial abstraction came to the forefront, and not just for artists who suddenly found themselves flung from the garret into a boom market, but for the public as a whole, heralding a cultural obsession with inflation, speculation, and arbitrage. Across the Cold War West, and specifically in the France and United States explored by Cras, this was a time when money became politicized as never before, causing artists to grapple with urgent questions of symbolic, economic, and social value. Specifically, these questions went from being extraneous to marking an immanent condition that lent itself to multiple levels of engagement. Although none of the artists Cras discusses, with the exception of Robert Filliou, were trained as economists, many took it upon themselves to intervene in the economics field, at a time when it was both crystallizing into the rigid neoclassical shapes we know today as well as becoming popularized with the publication of graphs and other metrics in the mass media. While some artists, such as Yves Klein, used their work to propose different structures of valuation, others, such as Larry Rivers, helped to accentuate the slippery ground on which more official definitions of value crafted by states and central banks were skating. However, all faced the incorporation of their work into an increasingly publicity-hungry machine, as Alexander Alberro has elaborated in Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (MIT Press, 2004). This was the same “spectacle,” as the Situationists would have it, that had consumed economics, captured in a 1959 article in the French press in these succinct terms: “Caught up in a general inflationary process, art cannot escape the conditions of a society governed by money” (Geneviѐve Bonnefoi, 17). This in turn has to a large extent determined the subsequent readings of these works as trivial or opportunistic, as...