Christoph Rausch:
A Good Day at the Treasury: On the Readymade Values of the Market in Art and Finance

How do actors in modern and contemporary art and finance use ‘the market’ as a medium of contingency? I will open this talk with an anecdotal account of Damien Hirst’s Beautiful Inside My Head Forever auction sale at Sotheby’s as it coincided with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brother’s on September 15, 2008. I proceed by problematizing conceptions of the global financial crisis as synonymous with ‘market failure.’ This problematization I trace back to Marcel Duchamp’s artistic technology of the readymade and to corresponding strategies of financial derivation. My diagnosis informs a genealogical pathway through which I describe how, starting in the 1960’s and 70’s, practices of art and finance simultaneously fed into a powerful apparatus of economic valuation and calculation that stabilized in the form of our current, 21st century financial capitalism. By approaching contested conceptions of the market and of market failure as both “subject of a particular, conjunctural crisis, as well as a metaphor for a crisis in the constitution of historical possibility,” I aim to contribute to new norms and forms of doing Economic Humanities: I show how global assemblages of art and finance now create value and accumulate financial profits from past and present artistic futures.

Dr. Christoph Rausch is associate professor at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, where he co-founded the Maastricht Centre for Arts and Culture, Conservation and Heritage (MACCH) and the Maastricht Experimental in and through the Arts Network (MERIAN). Rausch’s research is on the global relations between art and finance in the 21st century. Studying the emergence and proliferation of novel types of art storage spaces, including so-called freeports in offshore financial centers, he asks how an increasing financialization of art in and through storage problematizes public and private relations of ownership and display, speculation and risk, as well as regulation and taxation. Having conducted fieldwork at and around these new art storage spaces, Rausch currently finalizes a monograph (Better than Gold: Art in Storage and the Making of Financial Value) analyzing the contested technologies, politics, and ethics of art storage and art financialization practices. Rausch leads the public-private research consortium Priceless Assets of Subversion: Financial Crime and the Valuation of Unique Goods (PRICELESS) funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) (2024-2028).