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Unlike Adorno and Horkheimer's "The culture industry" which examines the ideologies embedded in cultural objects. This essay attempts to explain concepts of values raised by Marx in Chapter 1 on commodities in "Capital" by relating it to the production of a cultural object, specifically the liminal beast known as fine-art photography.

Marx defines a commodity as something outside us which satisfies human wants of some sort; and further distinguishes two aspects of value in a commodity - the use value and the exchange value. The use value of the commodity is simply the utility of the object; and that the object's use value is realized only by use or consumption. He says that "whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labor creates, indeed, use-values but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others, social-use values."

Fine-art photography is to be distinguished from commercial photography (which includes the sub-genres studio and stock photography) by its intentions and processes. Commercial photography, as its name implies, is dictated by the market; photographers hawk their portfolios to different clients and agencies and create their wares according to the whims of the client. The utility (or use value) of commercial photography is highly pragmatic and ranges from an individual wanting a studio portrait done as a gift to a media organization sourcing for appropriate imagery for their next advertising campaign.

Commercial photography is easily seen as a commodity; the prices are dictated by the market forces of supply and demand. If a photographer overprices himself or if he fails to deliver to the exact specifications of the client; there is always a large pool of other photographers able to deliver at a lower price that the client can turn to. Similarly, if there is a demand for a certain type or style of image; photographers will flood the market, increasing supply and lowering their prices to remain competitive, until it is saturated

Fine-art photographers, on the other hand, adhere to the "artist" notion of realizing their personal visions and create "artistic" renditions of that reality via the photographic process. Their work is exhibited by themselves, or by a representative such as a gallery and the process of exchange is idiosyncratic rather than market-based. The utility of fine-art photography is highly personal; and people purchase fine-art photography to satisfy their need for beauty, for prestige, and for investment.

Marx saw use values as bearers of exchange value but are independent from it. Exchange values, simply stated, is the price of the object; or how many units of an object can you exchange for x units of another. Use values are related to exchange value inasmuch as an object needs to be deemed to have use value before another party is willing to exchange something else for it. This exchange value (or price) is derived from the quantity of labour involved in the production.

If we consider each commodity as the average sample of its class; the aggregate labour time socially necessary for the production of the commodity determines its exchange value. At a risk of being too simplistic, Marx points out that this labour time refers to homogeneous human labour which all of society's labour can be abstracted into. While he is not very precise in his explanation, my understanding of this concept of uniform labour power is that there is a base labour unit of unskilled labour; and skilled labour would be simply a multiplication of this base unit of labour. Also, the laws of supply and demand come into play in aggregating the labour time. If the labour involved in the production of a good takes twice as long as the competitors hiring similarly skilled labour, that particular producer can't charge his good double from his competitors because he will have no buyers. He will either have to close his operations or to hire labour that can produce the good at the same or better rate than his competitors in order to remain in business.

For example, a hand-made piano by a single piano craftsman would not cost a hundred times less or more than a factory-made piano made by a hundred unskilled workers. That is because the skill necessary is socially deemed a hundred times that from the base unit of (unskilled) labour. One might consider this the exchange value of labour - how many units of unskilled workers can replace a single skilled worker. Marx, however, does not go into detail on how this exchange value of labour is determined as he does on commodities.

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing simply because the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between products of their labour.

Labour exchanged with goods, labour exchanged with itself

double production drops half labour value

Marx argues that when we abstract the abstraction of use values …
reduction … common property of labour. (congelation)
Exchange value is measurement of a use-value (use value of labour)

When commodities exchanged - exchange value as independent of use value

Exchange value derives from the quantity labour involved in the production

Hence a commodity must not only satisfy social want, it must also satisfy the want of its producer as exchange.

He saw exchange value as a quantitative relation of equality - where use values of one sort are exchange for another sort.

Relation constantly changing with time and place

socially-recognised standards of measure

A = b
Opposing with different form

Equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour-power by the duration of that expenditure.

Expression of the relation between hteir own private labour and the collective labour of society

Fetishim

I would argue that replication is a necessary condition of commodification. Nature replicates itself constantly; be it the ongoing natural processes that create our natural resources of ore and fuel to the process of reproduction. The exchange value of such things comes from how much labour Man needs to exploit this resource; be it through mining the ore, or harvesting the crops.

One can think of replication and commodification as sharing a direct positive relationship; something that is easily replicated is also easily commodified. This ease of replication and commodification is especially true of man-made goods where technology liberates him from the lengthy natural cycle of replication. A textile manufacturer can churn out extra yards of cloth to meet an increase in demand; or to vary his designs in his textiles to meet changing market tastes. A farmer, on the other hand, cannot magically produce an extra crop of wheat in the middle of his crop cycle; nor to vary the form of the wheat.

It can be seen that man-made goods have dynamic exchange values due to the elasticity of the demand and supply curves. Any changes in demand can be almost instantaneously counteracted by a change in supply. Hence, I would argue that an original artwork such as a painting or sculpture is not a commodity because the supply is limited to a single unit. Even though demand may be high or increasing for Van Gogh's "Wildflowers", there is only one original. The art world prizes individuation over interchangeability; and the potential buyers would not buy a similarly themed painting by another artist; nor would another artist undercut Van Gogh by painting in his style; nor would a lesser-known painting by Van Gogh be valued more because he spent more time working on it.

Although original artwork are bought and sold through galleries and auction houses, the exchange itself is essentially idiosyncratic - there is no objective standard upon which all equivalent artwork is priced. The "exchange value" is determined by the aggregate of the price the buyer places on his individual idiosyncratic criteria of technique, importance in the oeuvre etc. Because it is not a commodity, its "exchange value" is not determined by labour spent on its production. One occasionally reads about how auction houses like Christies were surprised by how much more an artwork or other fetish object was sold above their original "objective" valuation.

Marx writes, "every product of labour is, in all states of society, a use-value; but it is only at a definite historical epoch in society's development that such a product becomes a commodity, viz, at the epoch when the labour spent on the production … becomes expressed as one of the objective qualities of that article." This fetishism of commodities arise when the proportions of exchange have attained a certain stability such that they appear to result from the nature of the products.

Replication, then, is necessary to the fetishism of a commodity as these proportions of exchange can only gain stability if there is an "objective" force determining their exchange value via supply and demand, and labour time; and not due to idiosyncratic exchanges.

Thus Van Gogh's original "Wildflowers" is not a commodity but its replicas are. Due to market demand possibly spurred by the "bourgeois" desire of the masses to be deemed an arbiter of taste and culture, manufacturers produce poster reproductions, refrigerator magnets, art books, textiles - or whatever material they can imprint the image upon. And the exchange values of these objects are determined by the labour time necessary to produce them, eg. a coffee table book would be "worth" more than a magnet because more time and resources have been expended on its production; as well as the laws of supply and demand. Unlike artists who produce primarily for themselves (the sale of their work is incidental/accidental), these manufacturers (re)produce for the purpose of profit, or how these objects satisfy the producer's want as exchange.

Adorno and Horkheimer describes this process of commodification, "in the early, prosperous days of business, exchange-value did carry use value as a mere appendix but had developed it as a prerequisite for its own existence; this was socially helpful for works of art. Art exercised some restraint on the bourgeois as long as it cost money. That is now a thing of the past. Now that it has lost every restraint and there is no need to pay any money, the proximity of art to those who are exposed to it completes the alienation and assimilates one to the other under the banner of triumphant objectivity ... Consumers now find nothing expensive. Nevertheless, they suspect that the less anything costs, the less it is being given them."

This importance of replication to commodification can also be seen in the rise in popular music in the 20th century. Popular music has existed since pre-medieval times but its mode of replication was limited; troubadours and singing minstrels were limited by the geographic area they could travel to, and engraving (or notating) music was a time consuming and painstaking process entirely done by hand.

The rise in popular music (or of any intellectual property) in the 20th century is due to advances in technology which enabled it to be easily replicated and distributed. The commercial printing press led to the sale of sheet music, and it was a major business enterprise till the Depression. For the first time in history, a song could be replicated on the printed page and easily distributed, freed from peripatetic geographic limits. If a song became a hit, the publishers could easily roll off more copies off their presses. The emergence of recording technologies superseded sheet music as the primary commodity of the music industry because it replicated not just the music, but also the actual performance. And while, sheet music requires the user to be reasonably versed in notation, and to reproduce it via performance; recordings do not make such demands, and the song tirelessly replicates itself as many times as desired from the home stereo.

The fetishism of culture, then, derives from the medium upon which it is replicated. Yet, there is a schizophrenic mysticism attached to such commodities that has an effect on their exchange values. A CD by an established, well-known recording artiste is "valued" more than a newcomer recording for the same label. Even though both CDs cost the same labour time to produce, the CD by the famous artiste is "worth" more to the eyes of consumers. On the other hand, a reproduction of a Miro would be "worth" more than a reproduction of a Van Gogh because most people have not "discovered" or "understood" Miro's genius yet; even though it costs the publisher the same labour time and raw materials to print either the Miro or the Van Gogh reproduction. Each one of these commodities is seen to have some intrinsic value arising from their nature.

Original prints
Later edition
"vintage" Mystique of the artist's original intentions.

A quantitative relation of equality; where values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort.
(but Ansel adams vs Burkett?) opposition of different form.
Digital technology as threat to fine art

- surplus value

exchange value as source of surplus value

Surplus Value

Marx, in his explanation of use values, states that "use values constitute the substance of all wealth."
Something others would want and the production of which satisfies your need for exchange.

In "Capital", Marx uses pragmatic commodities as linen and coats to illustrate the concept of exchange value. Ironically, it is the idiosyncratic use-value of fine-art photography that, in my opinion, best illustrates the concept of exchange value and its link to the concept of surplus value.

A painter or fine-art photographer seems to be paid an inordinate amount from the sale of one of their works; but their production is finite and there is a small market for their wares. Let us assume the fine-art photographer manages to sell two prints every month, the exchange value of their work is not simply the amount of labour they put in producing the two prints but also the cost of reproduction of their labour; i.e. the cost needed to sustain them for a month to enable them to produce more prints.

Once we frame this context, it is clear that artists, (be they painters, photographers, or musicians), are simply a form of skilled labour under the capitalist cultural market. The accumulation of artwork is the sole province of the capitalist class; the price of most artwork being out of the abilities of most working class. When the artwork appreciates in value, it is the capitalist that benefits from the surplus value and not the artist. The artist has no recourse to this surplus value because the artwork is already out of his hands (exchanged for the cost of reproduction of his labour), while the capitalist can choose to sell the artwork on the idiosyncratic and fetishist art market and realize the surplus value in monetary (exchange) terms, or to sell it later when it has appreciated more value. Thus, the capitalist subsumes the opposing ideology of "working for oneself" only when it benefits them. This is not simply a cynical view; the evidence is furnished by how private bankers around the world - in addition to managing their client's million/billion dollar investment portfolio and properties, also manage their art collections. Art has been transformed from cultural objects of patronage into a financial asset.

Earlier, I argued that original artwork is not a commodity because it is primarily a personal use-value of the artist; as well as being idiosyncratic in exchange and inflexible in supply. However, an abstraction occurs once the artwork is in the hands of the capitalist class. The artwork transmutes from an object exchanged for labour into an object exchanged for its "intrinsic" value which is not based on labour but on its potential exchange value. Instruments of surplus value

The producers - raising the "intrinsic" value

Loses its original exchange value - exchanged on the exchange value.