The Value of Art and Freedom of Expression

Last year, the American film "The Price of Everything" was released. This film is a documentary that starts from the simple question: "Some contemporary art pieces have incredibly high prices, but who sets those prices and how?" Those interviewed include active artists, collectors, auctioneers, gallerists, and art critics.

The film features a variety of people, from those who emphasize market price like Jeff Koons, to artists who feign indifference like Gerhard Richter, and those who flatly state they have no interest in market prices like Larry Poons. Auctioneers and gallerists who believe good works should command high prices also appear. In a commercial country like the United States, price seems directly linked to the value of a work. Similarly, in emerging art markets in Asia, many people consider the market price to be the value of the artwork.

On the other hand, if we look at the example of Van Gogh, no one recognized his work during his lifetime except for his brother Theo. However, today, Van Gogh's works are among the most expensive art pieces. In other words, while his market price was nearly zero during his lifetime, his value was understood 100 years later, and it can be seen that the market price eventually caught up with the inherent value.

The mystery of art's value serves as a typical example of Giffen's "diamond effect," where "diamonds are valuable because they are expensive." Furthermore, it likely relates to the logic and psychology of branding businesses.

In Japan, the recognition that the value of art is not simply its market value seems to be surprisingly widely shared among the general public. This may be because Japan has a long history, with tea ceremony, ukiyo-e, and many antiques being familiar parts of life, leading people to feel instinctively that market price and the value of a work are different.

By the way, last year, the large-scale international exhibition "Aichi Triennale," held once every three years, became a topic of conversation regarding freedom of expression. This involved a group recreating an exhibition titled "After 'Lack of Freedom of Expression?'" which collected works that had been restricted from exhibition by organizers in the past. The most problematic pieces were a statue of a comfort woman and a video work that included a scene of burning a photograph of the Emperor. Immediately after the opening, a series of threatening phone calls and other messages came from people who took issue with these exhibits. For safety reasons, the organizers (Aichi Prefecture, etc.) closed this section two days after the opening. It was later reopened once the situation was deemed to have settled.

The discomfort surrounding this incident seemed to stem from a sense of incongruity regarding the display of a girl's statue—used as propaganda for the comfort women issue—as a work of art. When general national sentiment is added to this, many people likely found it difficult to sympathize with the simple slogan of protecting freedom of expression.

Generally, when wars occur, propaganda art is created to spread the government's claims. Many war paintings remain from Japan during the Pacific War, but these cannot be treated as equivalent to ordinary artworks. In China, many propaganda paintings were also produced during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. The comfort woman statue exhibited at the Aichi Triennale was also something created to represent the political claims of a neighboring country, and there is a sense of incongruity in treating this neutrally as an artwork (the work involving the burning of the Emperor's photograph has a long background originating from a different exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, so I will not discuss it here).

In an essay published in the Yomiuri Shimbun on December 2, 2019, Masakazu Yamazaki argued that this group might be confusing "expression" with "assertion." Ultimately, shouldn't we recognize that criteria such as expression, assertion, and the value of a work each have different meanings? However, if that is the case, how should we define what ought to be protected as expression?

Now, a country with freedom of expression must be a society that allows any work, regardless of what it is, to be exhibited equally. The definition is that the government does not obstruct the exhibition of works, even if they contain content that differs from government policy. This means that the comfort women exhibit should not have been restricted here. Since I was the president of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) Japan in 2019, I issued a protest statement regarding this issue.

What complicated matters was that the Agency for Cultural Affairs subsequently cancelled the subsidies for the Aichi Triennale, and the Embassy of Japan in Austria withdrew its official recognition of "JAPAN UNLIMITED," an exhibition of Japanese contemporary art held in Austria. This escalated the issue from the level of Aichi Prefecture to a national problem. As a result, Japan, which had long held an image as a "country with freedom of expression," changed into a "country that censors."

Of course, there is no country, including Japan, where expression is completely free. However, in the future, when Japanese international exhibitions invite foreign artists, they will begin to fear the possibility that their work might be censored. The damage from this is significant.

Perhaps what the propaganda exhibit of the comfort woman statue destroyed was the image of "Japan, a country where expression is free."