High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture

During almost any conversation about art, the elephant in the room whether it's mentioned or not is money. Paradoxically, in a world in which the global art market often plays the role of final arbiter on artistic matters, art history is still required as an insurance policy. For just as market success is now able to generate cultural relevance in the long term, it also depends on the kind of symbolic meaning for which art history and criticism are still decisively responsible. German writer and academic Isabelle Graw, a founder of the respected Berlin-based journal Texte zur Kunst, tackles this quandary in a stimulating book for our times. Translation from the German by Nicholas Grindell.