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Abstract
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. Each section focuses on an aspect of the imbrication of artistic work with economic issues in a period defined by the market expansion and currency fluctuation that started in the late 1950s and ended in the early 1970s with the termination of the Bretton Woods agreement. [...]the presentation moves through “value,” “currency,” “speculation,” and “commerce,” with several emblematic figures discussed in each, such as Klein, Warhol, Robert Morris, and Lee Lozano, as well as artists whose practices have fallen from the top shelf of art historical scrutiny in latter days, such as Les Levine and Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, or who have been acknowledged to have fallen off the radar for too long, such as mail-art impresario Ray Johnson. Little in the way of elaborated art historical study has been produced to date in a field that has more often chosen to attend to labor, as in the work of Julia Bryan-Wilson (University of California Press, 2009) or Danielle Child (Bloomsbury, 2019); to the art market, as in the work of Isabelle Graw (Sternberg Press, 2009); or to larger theoretical debates about art and value, which also encompass artistic labor in its encounter with finance as a cultural fact, as in my own work (Brill, 2018) or that of Dave Beech (Brill, 2015; Brill, 2020). [...]some debates are strangely occluded, even as the project justifies its commitment to providing an ingenious prism rather than a comprehensive cultural history.