Evaluating Value: Stolen, Disappearing and Pseudonymous Art

This chapter focuses on the visual arts market, where there is a significant lack of understanding as to how the market operates and art is valued within it. We argue that there is a need to further consider the social, political, and cultural values that underpin artworks which are valued by the market; that is, their ideological role, as value is never fixed or neutral, it is socially constructed in a system of power relations that remains a part of the political economy. Three examples of artworks show the process through which economic value emerges out of the socio-cultural system.