Asyouwish/2/4/09-Lyotard

Lyotard’s piece on What is Postmodernism had one specific line in it that was truly appealing to me. “But this realism of the ‘anything goes’ is in fact that of money; in the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield. This line was interesting to me because it is so right, almost everything in today’s world is valued by how much money it is worth. A diamond is valued because it is rare and expensive. A pair of Jimmy Choo shoes are valuable because they are nicely made and therefore are expensive because of the labor that has been put into it. This concept of paying for one’s labor is actually a Marxist concept. He believed that when purchasing a commodity you are purchasing hours of labor that went into the production of the product. Yet while most things in today’s world are created by machines those that are not are more expensive because they tend to include more detail and are of better quality. Take a Vera Wang wedding-dress for example; while you would already be paying a hefty amount for the label if you were to have a wedding-dress custom made you would be paying for the extra labor and hand sewing that went into making your dress. The cost of Vera Wang in general is expensive and thus they have become valuable because they unaffordable to the majority of the global population because most cannot afford a Vera Wang price tag. The value of something truly is based on how much money it is worth or costs. One of my friend’s parents has an enormous yacht that he took me out on. A boat like that is about 16 million dollar’s which is why it is so valuable. It is worth an absurd amount of money because it takes a long time to make and thus another example of Marx’s Commodity of Labor. It had crossed my mind that certain things were more expensive because it took more time to make them but I had never truly thought about how things are so much more expensive because of the labor actually put into them or that value was predetermined by how much someone was willing to pay for something.