“Nearly all of art history is about trying to identify the source of value in cultural objects. Color theories and dimension theories, golden means, all those sort of ideas, assume that some objects are intrinsically more beautify and meaningful than others. New cultural thinking isn’t like that. It says that we confer value on things. We create the value in things. It’s the act of conferring that makes things valuable. Now this is very important, because so many, in fact all fundamentalist ideas, rest on the assumption that some things have intrinsic value and resonance and meaning. All pragmatists work from another assumption: No, it’s us. It’s us who make those meanings.”
— Brian Eno, “A Big Theory of Culture” (1997)
Thanks, Jess Bruder
l find the initial experiment with the garage sale a seminal piece of work. Has it been published anywhere and has there been more similar work since, apart form that listed?
Jonathan — the results of the Significant Objects experiment have been collected, along with 100 stories from both SO’s first and subsequent “volumes,” will be published in a resplendent book format by Fantagraphics in July 2012.