Few books in recent memory have articulated so lucidly the nexus of deep interconnections among practices making up the core of the modern culture industry as The Value of Things by London-based artists Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska. This remarkable book project dramatically charts the powerful forces through which the values of things are negotiated and exchanged by intertwining the histories of two exemplary modern institutions—the British Museum and London’s Selfridge’s department store. As the authors write, “In a seemingly homogenized mass of consumables, nothing has a verifiable ‘essence’ or a legitimate history. Born into a promotional media, things can be made the puppets of any number of narratives of origin and belonging. Under these conditions, mass-consumed objects become souvenirs of origins they could never have. The souvenir (a quality wrapped around an object rather than the object itself) allows any thing to narrow the perceived gap between an experience and its recollection. In this distance resides a terrible yearning, a yearning to locate points of origin, trace lines of inheritance, and authenticate experience” (39–40).

As they see it, the souvenir articulates the desire to construct material images of oneself, ordering thought and feeling by finding their equivalence in material things. Museums, they argue, hold sequences of redundant historical artifacts, held in conserved perfection “to support the fantasy of origins we need to anchor us as we drift amongst the multiple choices of an intensely commodified present” (40).

Since 1995, the work of Cummings and Lewandowska has incisively examined the social role of art and other objects in the definition and fabrication of cultural values, and their collaborative practice has become an outstanding instance of the contemporary conjunction of anthropology, cultural studies, economics, art history, and artistic practice, challenging the solidity of the boundaries between such modern categories. Analysis and interpretation are treated as artistic products equal to display and exhibition, and they have worked with a variety of institutions as well as “sites” such as publications.

As with their recent work at the Tate Modern—the Tate’s first commissioned installation project and a major seminar series in spring 2001 entitled Capital, which compares the Tate to the Bank of England (the former founded on a gift, the latter on a debt)—The Value of Things combines economic terminology (the title references Marx’s classic dyad of exchange value vs. use value) with a semiotic analysis of social organization. Cummings and Lewandowska compare art and money as two symbolic systems, their central thesis being that the mechanisms for ascribing value to art objects and those governing exchange value in (other) commodity exchanges are fundamentally indistinguishable.

Through its sophisticated and playful juxtaposition of words and pictures and a visually stunning interweaving of narrative (hyper)texts, the book persuasively argues that “value,” far from being inherent in things, depends on “judgments made through encounters” that people have with their stuff at specific times and places (20). Exhibiting, collecting, browsing, art making, manufacturing, shopping, taste, and art historicizing are historically interwoven in a multimodal narrative rooted in a mature understanding of the work in many fields by authors as diverse as Benjamin, Bataille, Giddens, Bourdieu, Clifford, de Certeau, Foucault, Mauss, Marx, Simmel, and Braudel; and Cummings and Lewandowska seem in this comparative-interactive study of the modern institutions of the public museum and the department store as conversant with contemporary brand theory, advertising, and marketing as they are with the currents of critical writing in museology, visual culture, and art history.

The Value of Things is the authors’ representation of the forces through which value is negotiated and exchanged in modern culture, and is a brilliantly challenging synthesis of the thrust of many diverse strands of visual-culture studies of the past three decades, which more often than not have been pursued behind the firewalls separating different academic disciplines and professional practices. The book is organized in four sections. Part 1, “The Museum,” includes a fine summary of the history of the British Museum and an incisive look at the seminal role played by the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace in providing the first modern synthesis of art, industry, commerce, and identity. Part 2, “The Store,” is a description of the intertwined histories of London’s Selfridge’s and Chicago’s Marshall Field department stores and their key roles in the fabrication, maintenance, and marketing of taste and desire. Included in this part of the book is a discussion of the impact of the First World War as a catalyst for revolutionary changes in the social roles of museums and department stores.

Part 3, “Shopping,” is devoted to the history of shopping during the past century, tracing an arc from the act of buying to the contemporary experience of customers who have been made the restless casualties of manufactured desires. We are now encouraged, Cummings and Lewandowska argue, to use every object and image to imaginatively extend ourselves, playing roles drawn from a confusing array of objects eliciting desire. Part 4, “The Culture Industry,” is a brief critical history of the modern culture industry; the authors demonstrate how we increasingly play out our lives through what we want and display; ethical and moral choices becoming completely interwoven with the seemingly mundane decisions of trying things on to see if they fit.

The Value of Things portrays the long history of convergence between the museum and the department store as a paradigmatic chapter in the modern dissolution of previously clear (or clearly imagined) demarcations between the cultural and economic. The historical situation out of which contemporary middle-class citizens emerged justifies the authors’ “twinned histories,” as they put it (20), of the two quintessentially modern institutions that occupy privileged sites within the social organization of contemporary society. Each in its own way renders the fundamental similarities and redundancies with the other invisible. Cultural practice in modernity comprises at base participation in “all the glitter of the intensified aesthetic present” (117).

How does all this work? Implicated in the authors’ strategic conflation between collecting that which is unique and amassing that which is infinitely reproducible is the disciplinary status of art making, art-history writing, art criticism, aesthetic philosophy, and in fact all museological functions from heritage industries to the new communications technologies. The Value of Things problematizes at a deep level some basic and often unacknowledged assumptions about values being inherent in things. Their interventionist book project breeches the subdisciplinary boundaries still in place but increasingly porous between museology, advertising theory, the heritage industries, and philosophical aesthetics, to name just a few. By making virtual the exchange value of art objects, and by problematizing the idea of art as a kind of thing rather than as a way of using things under certain conditions (the “when” rather than the “what” of art), they respond to current criticism that the majority of artistic practices operate in a reductive denial of actual social realities.

The central issue for this artist couple is ethical, and they offer realistic alternatives to working within the art gallery system. Given the straightforwardness of their theoretical project, it is not surprising that this book has been seen as reductive itself and lacking in originality. Yet in our view neither subtlety nor originality can be any longer the point of social critique at the present juncture. Playing up to these two time-honored criteria diffuses, in fact, the social value of critique. The top priority has been and must remain the project of having real social effect. As long as the aesthetic ideology of “originality,” for example, determines the “value” of social critique, critique itself operates at a symbolic rather than an “actual” level. This critique is familiar in having been made before, but its familiarity is justified by the urgent need to effect social change. As long as Thatcherism—a historical moment that the authors describe as one demanding support of the arts by the private sector—is dominant, art is relegated to the drawing rooms of the marketplace, where it cannot interfere in any significant way with the relentless and ruthless process of corporate capitalism.

Cummings and Lewandowska make pointedly clear their practice as artists at the beginning of the book with the recognition that “it is no longer helpful to pretend that artists originate the products they make, or, more importantly, that they have control over the values and meanings attributed to their practice: interpretation has superseded intention. It is clear that artworks and artists exist in a larger economy of art; a symbolic economy built from an interrelated web of curatorship, exhibitions, galleries, museums, places of education, dealers, collectors, catalogues, books, theorists, critics and so on” (15).

Okay, we may have heard some of this before, often dramatically, albeit in discipline-specific and piecemeal fashion. What marks The Value of Things as a deeply compelling contribution to the contemporary crisis of culture is that unlike many others one could name, the authors accept the fact the corporate capitalism is neither late nor wilted but really is here for the duration. Artists and academics have no power to halt or even deter the grinding mechanisms of profit production. What they can do effectively, if The Value of Things demonstrates its own argument, is to offer consciousness-raising alternatives to the mindless, spectatorial participation in the game-playing, mind-deadening social order we all unavoidably occupy. To read Cummings and Lewandowska carefully is to become deeply aware that all of us are complicit in our current situation, and none of us is immune from the immanent critique.