Outing the Inside: On Louise Bourgeois

Provenance is the history/story of a piece, and it's a big value multiplier in the Art and Antiques world.

One of my favorite sections in The Man in the High Castle was the part about historocity. You take a $1 fountain pen, say it once belonged to FDR and now it is worth $1000. Whether it did is largely irrelevant to its value. A counterfeit pen perceived as authentic is worth more than an authentic pen perceived as fake, or of unknown provenance.

Dave Hickey calls the phenomenon you're talking about a piece of art's "social value"[0]. this goes for lots of things though, not just art (modern or otherwise) because all things exist in some historical context and so you can read them (accurately or not) as a cultural reaction or as being part of some larger Scene. my take is that one of the things that makes some art particularly effective is its ability to provoke these reactions when placed in new historical contexts.

modern art is particularly complicated because something like Duchamp's Fountain or Readymades can become easily reduced to trope or gimmick "<groan>, another toilet-as-art piece." but software is like this too!! "great, another algebraically-typed fp language with poor unicode support and no stdlib." the thing that makes us keep paying attention is the culture that develops around these things and advocates for and argues for the thing's "social value" irrespective of the "social virtue" we may observe as outsiders.

[0]: http://nsfmc.tumblr.com/post/1671107720/since-there-is-no-ab...

The apotheosis of this would be Michael Craig-Martin's An Oak Tree,[1] which some consider nonsense and I think is superb. All's fair in art and so on! That said, in the case of Bourgeois I find a lot of her work powerful without explanation.

[1]https://offthewalls.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/an-oak-tree-mic...