Exchange is the condition of society, and the reduction of the qualitative difference of individuals, their labor, and the products of their labor to quantitative equivalents is the condition of exchange. In capitalist society this fundamentally economic reduction is generalized beyond what is necessary to merely hold a society together; through the commodity form it becomes the total logic of social functioning.

The mass production and consumption of standardized goods represents the full articulation of this operation of reduction, in which individuals, already reduced to mere quantities of labor in work, are served up a mass of identical objects to represent their wants as identical in all but degree. Subject and object become commensurable; the latter just another quantity of the stuff that the subject is made of - exchange value. With all alterity erased from the world of things, the subject, as individual, is once again lost in "the invariability of the type." Its memorial will be no more than a pile of stones.

It could be said that it is the task of the cultural to reinscribe in the social the qualitative differences eradicated by the economic. The art object, as symbolic object, thus marks the resistance of society to the necessary homogenization of its constitutive parts. What else could it mean to call an object 'priceless' if not the assertion that its value is purely and exclusively qualitative, and it is therefore outside the realm of ordinary economic exchange. The insistence on and persistence of the criteria that an art object must be unique, is thus not an anachronistic remainder from a pre-industrial past, but the very condition of its function as a differentiating symbolic object.

But in a class society the appropriation of cultural goods with such symbolic qualities is distributed as unequally as the appropriation of quantities. Cultural domination consists in the power of turning, or rather, of returning, accumulated quantities into unique qualities; of economic capital into what becomes cultural capital - what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has called a profit in distinction:

To appropriate a work of art is to assert oneself as the exclusive possessor of the object and of the authentic taste for that object, which is thereby converted into the reified negation of all those who are unworthy of possessing it, for lack of the material or symbolic means of doing so, or simply for lack of a desire to possess it strong enough to 'sacrifice everything for it . . ." The exclusive appropriation of priceless works is . . . a challenge thrown down to all those who cannot dissociate their 'being' from their 'having' and attain disinterestedness, the supreme affirmation of personal excellence. ^[6]

Finally, the cultural monopoly of a class is not simply a monopoly of objects, a piling up of things, but the exclusive prerogative of its members to represent themselves, to re-present their differences as individuals in their unique objects, their individual works. This monopoly has become a part of our language, as culture (the customs, beliefs, and symbolic practices of a social group) is rarefied as culture (the enlightenment of taste), quality (a particular attribute) is appropriated as quality (status, rank, degree of excellence), and distinction (differenciation) is elevated to distinction (special honor and recognition).

If you're not one of those people who affects history and most of us are not then how are you supposed to enjoy looking for personal meaning in the souvenirs of that class of people who manipulate history to your exclusion? How can this be possible? I think it takes a pretty blind state of euphoric identification to enjoy another's power to exclude you. I usually end up feeling angry and powerless when I visit a museum. I find myself thinking, "Who are these people? Who paid for this building? Where did they get their money? Who chose these art works? How much did they cost? What does all of this have to do with my experience?" And on and on . . . I work to remedy this alienation by basing the value of my work on a new model, a model based on abundance and availability, not uniqueness and exclusivity.

Allan McCollum ^[7]

With Individual Works McCollum attempts to turn the egalitarian promise of mass production to the service of a redistribution of symbolic objects. Neither an optimist of bad faith who embraces the structures that exclude him for vicarious legitimacy, nor a pessimist who simply abandons the art object to its present function as an agent of class hegemony, McCollum looks beyond the current state of affairs, conceiving the art object not as "a product of [class] domination predisposed to express or legitimate [class] domination," ^[8] but as simply a symbolic object predisposed to designated the subject in its desire as distinct from "the invariability of the type."

McCollum neither simply superimposes the conditions of industrial production on artistic practice nor attempts to raise them, in a heroic gesture, to the status of high art as has been the tendency of modernist sculpture from David Smith to Richard Serra. McCollum is not an artist posing as a worker. Nor is he, like some of the 'postmodern' artists with whom he has been associated, a consumer posing as an artist. McCollum is, rather, a worker producing unique, potentially symbolic, objects in mass, posing as an artist who produces contemporary art.

Andrea Fraser
New York City
1988