Creators are sometimes the best social scientists’ friends. It is the case when they provide live experiments regarding the boundaries of art, as Marcel Duchamp and Constantin Brancusi did with the famous trial against the American administration after it had applied industrial taxing rules to an imported sculpture fault of having considered it an artwork.[1] Boundary objects such as design or contemporary art pieces are perfect tools for socio-artistic experiments, since they belong to categories of activities which play with ontological boundaries between art and ordinary life: a play defining what is usually called “contemporary art”, thus sometimes transforming it into a kind of sociology in action.[2] Some eighty years after the Brancusi vs USA case, taxing became once more the nexus of a boundary test, but in a more radical way since the works themselves have been designed in advance in order to implement the test. The “Beta Tank” experiment Beta Tank is the name of a Berlin collective of young creators. During the 2000s they decided to experiment in practice with the lability of the fragile boundary between art works and functional objects through two parallel kinds of displacements: topographical displacements and categorial displacements between art and industry, the latter being provoked by the former. They entitled this experiment “Taxing Art.” A first example was that of a table/sculpture, as described by its conceptor: “I used full steel profiles to make 119 squares, which were perforated to house axels and magnets to stop the pyramids from spinning freely. The table now has two states: one in which the tops of the pyramids are pointed down and resembles a complete functioning table and one in which the pyramids are up and the table is a sculpture. I wanted to transport it across the border to the exhibition in Basel with all the pyramids pointed up in order to classify the object as a sculpture.”[3] The conclusion of the test was the following: “In Barcelona it was labeled a wooden table; in Istanbul it had been transformed into parts of a wooden dining table; and in Doha the exact same table had become personal effects. Only in Berlin did it finally become a sculpture.[4] Consequently, the taxing basis of this sociologically experimental table changed from one country to another.” The second example is that of a strange chair, or rather a series of objects which, depending on a subtle scale of deformations of the angle between the seat and the backrest, gradually pass from the status of a chair to that of an abstract geometric form, non-functional since it is no longer possible to sit on it. It therefore becomes assimilable to sculpture rather than to design. The whole Taxing Art experiment was intended to test chapter 97 of the “Combined Nomenclature” (CN) developed by the European Union for the taxation of goods. Regarding visual arts, its definitions still clearly identify classical and modern paradigms (paintings, sculptures, drawings, pastels…). As the installation-exhibition crossed Europe from country to country and from fairs to biennials – from Berlin to Barcelona, from Basel to Istanbul – it crossed and recrossed the tiny border between design and art and, at the same time, it tested the resistance of institutions to innovation through tax regulations. Proof was thus made that, contrary to the liberal doxa, the works of living artists cannot travel freely; and above all that it takes very little to go from art to design, and vice versa. In certain cases, especially with things conceived as boundary objects, the financial valuation, even when framed by fixed conventions, can dramatically vary according to contexts. From value to valuation This experiment fully illustrates the pragmatic theory of value that I proposed in my works on contemporary art and on values: value is not the cause of valuation but its consequence. In other words: value is the result of the whole set of operations through which a quality is assigned by a subject to an object (be it a thing, a person, an action, or an abstract entity) in a certain context – and the Taxing Art experiment demonstrates the importance of the context. This assignment can take three forms: measure, attachment and judgement. In the case of Taxing Art the object is a thing, submitted to pricing in the taxing process, parallel with other contexts in which it might be submitted to attachment (e.g., being fond of it) or judgement (e.g., commenting it as “a real art work,” or as “an original piece of design.” etc.). The price – or in this case the taxing amount – results from the conjunction of these factors, which combine the two meanings of “qualification”: categorization and evaluation. Taxing Art also demonstrates the priority of categorization over evaluation. In the valuation process evaluators implement valuation principles, which are also called “values”: for example, in the case of Taxing Art, value of comfort, or of utility, or of beauty, or of originality, or of playfulness, or of rarity, or of perennity… Framed as belonging to modern art it would probably require the value of authenticity. Framed as belonging to contemporary art the value of meaning would be expected. Applying those value principles require the implementation of more precise qualities or criteria, which themselves rely on concrete “affordances,” according to the vocabulary of the psychology and the sociology of perception: that is, objective characteristics of the object orienting its perception (e.g., aspect, form, size, etc.). This is why value is neither subjective nor objective nor arbitrary: it is motivated by the affordances of the valuated object (e.g., the wooden pyramids in Taxing Art), by the collective representations shared by actors (e.g., that of the categories of art or design), and by the possibilities offered by the contexts (e.g., with Taxing Art: various countries, biennales, contemporary art fairs) in which these representations are implemented onto an object. Thus, value results from actions of valuation supported by a conjunction of personal preferences, of objective properties and of contextual opportunities. So, what should be the right tax in the case of Taxing Art? There is no unique answer to this question since it depends on various and varying factors. Conclusion The term “value” is frequently invoked though little or ill defined. Rather than dismissing the issue, as sociologists often do, I propose to take it seriously, using the tools provided by pragmatic sociology through a descriptive, comprehensive and neutral approach. In that perspective, values appear as neither metaphysical realities, nor as mere illusions, but as collective, coherent and active mental representations. Contrary to moral philosophy, which pretends to say what “true” values ​​are in themselves, the “axiological sociology” I propose addresses what values are ​​for the actors, by describing how various categories of actors actually produce valuations; how they attribute “value,” in the first sense of “worth” or “importance,” through prices, judgments, or attachments; how the various objects thus valuated become “values” in the second sense of goods; and how these valuations are based on “values” in the third sense of valuation principles (such as truth, goodness, beauty, etc.). These principles, conceived as collective mental representations, are widely shared but differently implemented according to the subjects who evaluate, to the objects that are evaluated, and to the valuation contexts, be they cultural or micro-sociological. The pragmatic analysis of actual judgments, controversies, or endless disputes – such as debates on bullfighting – allows the highlighting of the culture of values ​​shared by members of the same society. We thus discover that, contrary to common sense belief, opinion is not reducible to public opinion; that value is reducible neither to price, nor to moral values; that values ​​are neither rightist nor leftist; and that they are neither metaphysical entities existing “in themselves,” nor arbitrary constructions or concealments of hidden interests. They are but mental representations connected to physical affordances and to cultural criteria.

The materialist perspective has long prevented sociology from focusing on values as a legitimate object, while the idealist and metaphysical perspective has long prevented scholars from focusing on the actual actions and situations of valuation, which are the very core of axiology. This is the lesson of the Taxing Art experiment at the light of a pragmatic sociological analysis.

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[1] Cf. N. Heinich, « C’est un oiseau ! Brancusi vs États-Unis, ou quand la loi définit l’art », Droit et société, n° 34, 1996(re-published in Faire voir. L’Art à l’épreuve de ses médiations, Bruxelles, Les Impressions nouvelles, 2007).

[2] Cf. N. Heinich, Le Triple jeu de l’art contemporain. Sociologie des arts plastiques, Paris, Minuit, 1998 ; Le Paradigme de l’art contemporain. Structures d’une révolution artistique, Paris, Gallimard, 2014.

[3] Beta Tank, Taxing Art. When Objects Travel, Berlin, Gestalten, 2011, p. 55.

[4] Ibid. p. 153.