The question of value is an ancient one. For Cortés, the value of a work of art whose “very novelty and strangeness” rendered it “priceless,” was superseded by the value of the raw material from which the work was made and which had been granted a (however fluctuating and symbolic) market price. Since gold itself was the measure of the value of his social transactions, he deemed himself justified in turning the Aztec artworks into ingots. (In our time, the businessman who bought van Gogh’s Sunflowers and locked up the painting in a safe proceeded under exactly the same conviction.)
Of course, other values exist. The German language, for instance, employs several words to denote value and its different meanings, such as Gewalt (the quality of power), Wert (the agreed-upon importance of something), Geltung (the current validity), Gültigkeit (the official worth or usefulness) in the fields of morality, aesthetics, scholarship, and epistemology. But for Cortés, the monetary value superseded them all. Such an overriding notion allowed the baron de Montesquieu, two centuries later, to suggest mockingly that if buying and selling have become our evaluating scales, “a man is worth the price he would be sold for in Algiers.”
By assuming, like Cortés, the precedence of economic values, we change our relationship to all creative activities. If financial profit is the final goal, then perfection of a kind is what we are after: the production of artifacts that are easily converted into money. That is to say, in a world in which monetary value is the measure of all things, works of art that do not carry in themselves immediate financial gratification, that require mostly long and laborious procedures, that cannot be defined by tags or sound bytes, and that may or may not result in commercial benefits through convoluted aesthetic, ethical, or philosophical byways must be discarded or, at least, given very little consideration. Failure, the acceptance of which is inherent in any creative activity, is regarded in such a light as anathema, as are the poetic creations Shelley called “nurslings of immortality,” since economic law demands that whatever is created carry within itself its own mortality, its “sell by” date, which will enable the chain of production to continue to sell its products. The artistic qualities of a work must be subjected to the taste of the majority or, in certain cases, to a supposed “elitist” taste which the majority are told they might, for a price, attain. Under the common evaluation of economic worth, all other values blur or dissolve.
This need to consume is created, not through the opening of new fields of intellectual and emotional exploration by the work of art itself, but by planned campaigns that, inspired by census taking and market research, effectively invent a prehistory of longing for something that will be later deliberately produced to satisfy it. Readers don’t know that they “need” the Alice books until they have discovered and read Carroll’s work and see how his writing lends words to their own unuttered experience. However, it is possible to produce books to appease a spiritual “need” after advertising prefabricated pseudo-mysticisms available to all, filling bookstores with apocalyptic warnings and conspiracy theories based, of course, on real collective anguish and fear. But while Carroll, even when portraying our most nightmarish experiences, does not provide consolatory solutions, only rich questions in the style of the ancient oracles, the ersatz Alice-texts shower us with tidy answers, clipped and rounded and superficially satisfying, catechisms that lend their readers the illusion of having solved immemorial riddles which, because of their very nature, must remain unresolved.
In our time, in order to create and maintain the huge and efficient machinery of financial profit, we have collectively chosen speed over deliberate slowness, intuitive responses over detailed critical reflection, the satisfaction of reaching snap conclusions rather than the pleasure of concentrating on the tension between various possibilities without demanding a conclusive end. If profit is the goal, creativity must suffer. Discussing the lack of support for scientific research outside the private industries, I once heard a scientist comment, “Electricity was not invented by attempting to produce better lamps.”
Notoriously, every age develops its own artistic genre for its own brand of fools. In the Middle Ages, the charlatan’s sermons and fortune-teller’s prophecies were two of the most popular; in Carroll’s day, it was the three-volume “silly” novel and the moral tales. In ours, the fool’s art par excellence is the art of advertising—commercial, political, or religious—the ability to create desire for the preys of moth and rust. Advertising begins with a lie, with the assertion that Brand X is more important, or more necessary, or merely better than other brands, and that its possession, like that of the magic objects in fairy tales, will make the owner wiser, more beautiful, more powerful, than his or her neighbor. The willing suspension of disbelief that Coleridge demanded from the reader is tempered in advertising by an induced and simultaneous suspension of belief: the goods or services advertised require not so much belief or disbelief as a kind of bland faith in the imaginary thing created, in which colorful, innocuous images, conventional but voided symbols, simple reassurances or commands lull the viewer into a state of vacuous longing. These images surround us now at all times and everywhere. When we speak of a modern “culture of images,” we forget that such a culture was present since the days of our prehistoric ancestors, only the images on caves, in medieval churches, or on Aztec temple walls carried profound and complex meanings, while ours are deliberately banal and shallow. It is not fortuitous that advertising companies control the contemporary art market in which that same deliberate banality and shallowness have been transformed into qualities that justify the monetary value of a work.
Both qualities, however, respond to a view of the world. The world, as we recognize from the moment we are born, is a library of signs, an archive of mysterious texts, a gallery of compelling images, some arbitrary or haphazard, some deliberately created, which we feel we are meant to decipher and read. A natural inclination, what Professor Giovanna Franci calls “the anxiety to interpret,” leads us to believe that everything is language, pictures of a vocabulary whose key may be lost, or never existed, or must be wrought again to unlock the pages of the universal book. Plants, animals, clouds, the faces and gestures of others, landscapes and sea currents, constellations and forest tracks have their equivalent in pictographs and ideograms, in letters and coded signals with which we attempt to mirror our experience of the world. The Aztecs called their colored manuscripts maps, a better word to make explicit this relationship than our neutral text.
But there is also such a thing as a false map that leads nowhere except back to itself. The Hatter has been father to a huge mass of such cartography produced in the past twenty or thirty years by philosophers, sociologists, and economists, who, couching their arguments in elegant language and protected by some version of freedom of speech, defend the virtues of greed and self-enrichment and lend intellectual weight to those who use their power to achieve them. Holding on to what he has and yet always grasping for something else, the Hatter offers others nothing and, pointing to his laid-out table, tells the others to take more, and to believe that “it’s very easy to take more than nothing …” It is not very easy to take more than nothing, as millions on our planet know. But the rules of the mad tea party are those of the world we have constructed so that we can keep for ourselves vast spaces meant for many, so that we can offer wine that is not there and “more” tea to someone who has had none, so that we can appropriate fresh territory after we have spoiled the one we have been occupying. To amass more than we can possibly need or enjoy, to propose to others participation in a common culture that is being eroded daily and gradually replaced with “nothing,” to suggest to the poor and needy that they help themselves to “more” of the common wealth when they had none in the first place, to clear-cut, mine out, or fish dry vast areas of our planet and then move on to others, leaving behind our spillage and waste, are the methods of our global madness, regardless of whether we are dealing with fellow human beings, forests, seas, the earth we inhabit, or the air we breathe. They are methods by which we appear to share fortunes and misfortunes with others when in reality we share nothing, we hand over nothing, we hide our wine and hold on to our tea and feel comforted by what we believe we see.