Money, Morals, and the Divine Market

After our visit to the IU Art Museum exhibit of Renaissance through Modern art, I have a deeper understanding for appreciation and analysis of artifacts. In the time that we walked the area of the exhibit and after our discussions of a few of the paintings, I feel like I am able to look at an artifact with several different lenses. I can look for basic facts and describe only what I see, analyze what I see, and then interpret what I saw. A lot of the still life paintings we looked at gave you the power to decide what was most important, and what each individual object meant. In discussing still life paintings, and learning to really look at artifacts, sometimes longer than you would think you might need to, I have also connected Joshua Wolf Shenk's article: The Things We Carry to my overall experience this week.

In this article Shenk articulates the importance of moral versus market value and worth being intrinsic or extrinsic through the use of a short story regarding his typewriter and objects mentioned on Antiques Roadshow. he also discusses how everything we have are becoming commodities and the market is a divine force. In many cases, once people found out how much their morally valued objects were worth in dollars and cents, the object became more significant, or significantly less important. It was almost heartbreaking for many of the people he mentioned who went to the appraiser because what they found out made them question what they carried. I think one good example of this was the old man who had the whale tooth. As he got it out of the bag, the appraiser, with little patience told him it was worth nothing and that he could find that particular object anywhere he wanted.  The author's description of the mans response to this made me feel so badly. Would it not be better for him to just appreciate what he has and be happy with its intrinsic and moral worth? Now that he was told it was worthless, at least in regards to dollar value, the man became somber and disregards his previous feelings. This is also a great example of another one of Shenk's points. Int he article he discuses the belief in things that can be touched or counted and the belief in feelings, that are evoked by these things. I think both aspects play an important role in why we carry the objects we carry.

Although this article seems more appropriate in suggesting ideas about an antique store, I find it crucial to take a step back and look at this as a way of looking at museums in general, regardless of the exhibition and artifacts presented. at the IU Art Museum, when we were looking at all of the art I was not thinking of value, I just thought that all the artifacts had value, and worth because they were displayed. it makes me wonder what my opinion might be if some random person on the street had it and their grandfather painted it in the past. With grandfather not being famous and having no other well known works, would I still consider it valuable? If you asked me I would probably say no. But that is because we are learning to stray from intrinsic and moral value, and judge on market value. In this day and age, it becomes a question of would I buy that? Not, what is that object's moral history? Interesting concept to think about. I really enjoyed this weeks reading.