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are we magic? and did my mother teach me to be withholding?

Isabelle Graw - High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture. Beyond the Dualistic Art/ Market Model

In her essay ‘High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture’ Isabelle Graw presents a reality (tv?) of how the commercial artworld functions and the relationship that has with the world of art theory and with what she deems artists artists, those who believe in the idea more than the patron.

Is this a fair assumption to use as assult upon the integrity of any given artist? No it very much isn’t.
‘Everybody knows the useful is useful, but nobody knows that the useless is useful too.’ Chuang-Tse.

What interests me in the world of art as super commodity and the magic imbued in the fingertips of artstars which transforms commodity into hyper commodity. In his essay “The Baptism of Money and the Secrets of Capital” Michael Taussig begins with a case study of interest in the Southern Cauca Valley in Southern Columbia, of which he frequented anthropologically. The case study involved the Godparent of a given child about to be baptised, concealing a peso in his or her hand and transferring the power of the baptism from the child to the peso. Through this process imbuing the peso bill with power and condemning the child to eternal limbo.
This begins an essay in which Taussig explains and muses on use value vs. exchange value of money and commodity. In particular explaining a barren method of value vs. a fertile method. This ceremonious action of baptising money, turning money into the means of exchange itself has much to do with inflation of art prices etc.
Though this can be a rather loose metaphor on the economical side, it has a much stronger relationship from the systematic blessing and attention shown to cultural commodities, such as Pantone’s colour palette or mop buckets in the Ultility Closet of the New Gallery.

“A community can in many ways be affected and controlled by the wider capitalist world, but this in itself does not necessarily make such a community a replica of the larger society and the global economy. Attempts to interpret precapitalist social formations by means of what Polyani called our obsolete market mentality are misguided exercises in an ingenuous ethnocentrism, which in fact is not even applicable to the market society itself, but is merely a replication of its appearance.”

Where does the artists artist sit in all this?

Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009, pp. 81-94 and 112 - 116.
Michael T. Taussig. "The Baptism of Money and Secrets of Capital." Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. University of South Carolina Press. 1980. pp. 126-139