Creating Values & Hierarchies in a Capitalist Market

In her piece, cultural differences and the density of objects, Weiner invites us to consider the impact of withholding particular items from commodity circulation in order to increase their prestige and value within the marketplace. She uses examples from non-capitalist societies such as the kula shells, fine mats, and other cloth-types that are imagined to exist on a continuum that ranges from highest rank and inalienable objects to low status, common objects used to circulate goods. She emphasizes how "juxtaposing one society's valuable objects against another's" facilitates understanding of how historical happenstance and cultural circumstances generate the symbolic nature of an "inalienable object" and the implications of keeping it out of common exchange.

Following this suggestion, I immediately began to think of how American society values art (which she ended up mentioning briefly at the end of the article). Last semester I had a class on Art in Social Context, where we touched on the notion of money's relation to artworks. One example I always found outrageous, Mark Rothko's White Center, sold at auction in 2007 for $72.84mil to a private collector. I found it hard to believe that a man could paint three blocks of colors on another color, a skill found in that of drawings done by toddlers, could be worth that much money. However, prior ownership is involved here, as this painting may be more well known by its common name, Rothko's Rockefeller, alerting all that this particular Rothko piece was once owned by American-famous capitalists, the Rockefeller family. Everyone in the collectors realm wanted to own a prestigious-by-association painting. Although this is confusing to many on why it matters that the Rockefellers happened to own something, other people that recognize their historical significance within a culture that hinges on the tenants of capitalism, would kill to get their hands on any worldly possession of the family. By making this connection, I found it easier to envision the continuum of hierarchy involved with objects as described by Weiner.

Although I find the prior example to be obvious, I further tried to place the notion of an object's created value within my own context. In a more simplistic view, I thought of the assigned value of "rare" objects. A trip to my local fish store could even help to exemplify these views, where the owner has a rather large fish, a zebra pike cichlid (which is impractical to keep for most people of the hobby based on its sheer size), advertised as "EXTREMELY RARE!!! $699". Now, it is reasonable to say, who in their right mind would spend that much money on a fish? It is eventually going to die, it doesn't serve much utility other than to have something pretty to look at (same function as Rothko's Rockefeller). This fish has no particularly special prior ownership and doesn't serve to increase one's socio-political status...but the point I'm trying to make is based in the fact that because the zebra pike cichlid rarely enters the US aquarium trade, the high pricetag attached to it can be seen as reasonable. 

As products of socialization to a capitalist society, we better understand Weiner's points through an exchange value associated with money rather than an association to a particular person or cultural meaning. This is because the American market depersonalizes objects to attend to monetary exchange values that are known constants by all consumers - in effect, it reifies the continuum described by Weiner as objects can be ranked according to their pricetags (ones worth more money are considered to be more valuable than those with low, everyday prices). What Weiner is observing is the process in which an object generates a "pricetag" or value within its social context. It makes sense why it may be hard to grasp the concepts of the shells, mats, or cloths for people who are not embedded within that cultural circumstance because we have no prior notion of the history and social ties affiliated with the objects discussed.