Book Launch and Talk
Between Isabelle Graw and Thomas Crow
Isabelle Graw: High Price
Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture
January 21, 2010
7 p.m. (free admission)
Wyoming Building
5 East 3rd Street (between Bowery and 2nd Ave)
New York, NY 10003
T: 212 439 8700
“The balancing act performed by the artwork as a commodity between price and pricelessness is considered the matrix for the double game played by those who banish the market to an imaginary outside, while at the same time constantly feeding it.”
The art world is no longer dominated by a small group of insiders. According to Graw, the art economy has been transformed from a retail business into an industry that produces visuality and meaning. Written during both the height of the most recent art boom in early 2008 and its sudden collapse thereafter, High Price upholds a unique position towards the art world’s inner contradictions between symbolic meaning and monetary value. Not confined to simply contemporary artistic behaviors, Graw traces these largely unspoken contradictions from Courbet to Warhol, Yves Klein to Merlin Carpenter, and thereby marks a comprehensive entryway into understanding what exactly is occurring, both epistemologically and culturally, in today’s art world.
Isabelle Graw is Professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism. She is an art critic and co-founder of Texte zur Kunst in Berlin
Thomas Crow is an American art historian, art critic, and a contributing editor to Artforum. He is the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. His work includes, among other titles, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent and Modern Art in the Common Culture (both 1996).
For further information about the talk, please contact Philipp Leist, Goethe-Institut New York, at leist@newyork.goethe.org.
For press inquiries and orders, please contact mail@sternberg-press.com.
Isabelle Graw: High Price
Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture
Translated from the German by Nicholas Grindell
January 2010, English
13.8 x 21.4 cm, 248 pp., 23 b/w ill., softcover
ISBN 978-1-933128-79-5
