Post by Jonathan Tracy

Some thoughts on the statement that “capital alone no longer grants access.” Materialist semiotics now seems almost prophetic. It argues that signs and meaning never exist apart from their material and historical conditions. Rather than disappearing, those conditions have simply changed. The trajectory from Marxist critiques of production to today’s economies of visibility suggests that artistic value is no longer produced by capital alone. It is mediated through networks, institutions, cultural credibility, attention, and trust. Economic capital remains necessary, but it is increasingly transformed into symbolic capital before it gains cultural legitimacy. Perhaps the material substrate has shifted—from production to circulation, from labor to visibility—and with it the ways artistic value is produced and recognized.