THE CERTIFICATION OF THE VALUE OF ART. EXPERTS AND EXPERTISE

Raymonde Moulin | Alain Quemin
Annals Year 1993 48-6 pp. 1421-1445
Part of a thematic issue: Worlds of art

Today we are witnessing the proliferation of expertise and recourse to experts has become a fashion phenomenon which does not spare artistic policy. The competence of the professional culminates in expertise and if all experts are not professionals in the sense that the word has in Anglo-Saxon sociology, they generally aspire to become so. Political and administrative officials, for their part, have become accustomed to appealing to the objectification capacity of experts. The commission of experts thus appears as the updated version of the very general and very old consultation process of the republican administration, both protection and alibi. As art has become, after rationalization, a specialized activity, it is hardly surprising that the model of recourse to experts has become widespread to the point of dominating cultural institutions and the market.
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The examination of the mechanisms of construction of the value of art shows that if the interactions between the experts and the economic actors are not absent from the revaluation and devaluation operations relating to the past, they are even more evident in the conflicting uncertainty of the assessments. aesthetics focused on immediately contemporary art. To minimize the risk of choice, political leaders in the artistic field as in other fields, surround themselves with experts by handing over the competence of specialists. Expertise thus becomes one of the major mechanisms for constructing the value of art. It is not forbidden to question, finally on the certification of experts authenticating the value of art and on the criteria to which they refer to build the certification of the value of art and the reputation of artists. Artistic markets, and especially the contemporary art market, are contexts in which uncertainty dominates, uncertainty about the value of goods; on the value of the skills required to achieve professional success, whether it is experts or artists. The term expertise has multiple meanings of which we are far from having exhausted the list. Limiting our analysis to the definition of expertise in French usage, we noted the delayed effect of professionalization on activities related to art, on the one hand; the increased role of expertise in the dual form of attribution and validation in building the value of art, on the other hand. The certification of value conditions the price even if, because values ​​constitute an articulation of the artistic field and the market, the price can be one of the criteria for the certification of value.

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