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| Filippo Rega Intaglio - Nereid in profile before 1833 beryl British Museum |
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| Saulini Workshop, Rome Cameo - Classical woman in profile ca. 1860 sardonyx, gold British Museum |
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| Anonymous Italian Gem-cutter Cameo - Ceres ca. 1820 chalcedony, enameled gold British Museum |
"The object produced often bears traces of the matériel and time that have gone into its production – clues to the operations that have modified the raw material used. This makes it possible for us to reconstruct those operations. The fact remains, however, that productive operations tend in the main to cover their tracks; some even have this as their prime goal: polishing, staining, facing, plastering, and so on. When construction is completed, the scaffolding is taken down; likewise, the fate of an author's rough draft is to be torn up and tossed away, while for a painter the distinction between a study and a painting is a very clear one. It is for reasons such as these that products, and even works, are further characterized by their tendency to detach themselves from productive labor. So much so, in fact, that productive labor is sometimes forgotten altogether, and it is this 'forgetfulness' – or, as a philosopher might say, this mystification – that makes possible the fetishism of commodities: the fact that commodities imply certain social relationships whose misapprehension they also ensure."
– Henri Lefebvre, extract from La Production de l'espace (Paris, 1974), translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith and published as The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991)
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| Pietro Girometti Cameo - Minerva of Aspasios ca. 1840 sardonyx, enameled gold British Museum |
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| Giuseppe Girometti Cameo - Bacchus before 1851 onyx, gold British Museum |
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| Giuseppe Girometti Cameo - Hercules before 1851 onyx, gold, pearls, diamonds British Museum |
"The old relationship between the viewer and the viewed is stood on its head. By treating works of art like mere facts, the modern attitude attempts to commodify and sell cheap even the mimetic moment of art, which is the opposite of a thing-like essence. Today the consumer is allowed to project his impulses and mimetic residues onto anything he pleases, including art, whereas in the past the individual was expected to forget himself, lose himself in art in the process of viewing, listening and reading. Ideally, the individual effected his identification with art not by assimilating the work of art to himself but by assimilating himself to the work. This is what the term 'aesthetic sublimation' was meant to denote. Earlier on, Hegel had called the same mode of conduct freedom towards the object. In so doing he paid homage to the idea of subject which becomes a spiritual subject only by externalizing itself in an object, in contrast to the philistine who craves art for what he can get out of it. If art is viewed as a clean slate for subjective projections, it loses its distinctive character."
– from Aesthetic Theory by Theodor Adorno, translated by Christian Lenhardt (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984)
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| Giuseppe Girometti Cameo - Head of Psyche before 1851 onyx, gold British Museum |
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| Giuseppe Girometti set of cameo portraits Father & two Sons before 1851 onyx British Museum |
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| Giuseppe Girometti set of cameo portraits Father & two Sons before 1851 onyx British Museum |
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| Giuseppe Girometti set of cameo portraits Father & two Sons before 1851 onyx British Museum |
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| Giuseppe Girometti Cameo - Diomedes with Palladium before 1851 onyx, gold British Museum |
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| Giuseppe Girometti Cameo - Omphale sleeping with the club of Hercules before 1851 onyx, gold British Museum |
"The various forms of interdependence emphasized here have considerable bearing on what may be recognized as the economics of literary and aesthetic value. The traditional – idealist, humanist, genteel – tendency to isolate or protect certain aspects of life and culture, among them works of art and literature, from consideration in economic terms has had the effect of mystifying the nature – or, more accurately, the dynamics – of their value. In view of the arbitrariness of the exclusion, it is not surprising that the languages of aesthetics and economics nevertheless tend to drift towards each other and that their segregation must be constantly patrolled. . . . The recurrent impulse and effort to define aesthetic value by contradistinction to all forms of utility or as the negation of all other nameable sources of interest or forms of value – hedonic, practical, sentimental, ornamental, historical, ideological, and so forth – is in effect to define it out of existence; for when all such utilities, interests, and other particular sources of value have been subtracted, nothing remains. Or to put this in other terms: the 'essential value' of an artwork consists of everything from which it is usually distinguished."
– from Contingencies of Value by Barbara Herrnstein Smith (Harvard University Press, 1988)
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| Benedetto Pistrucci Cameo - the young Augustus ca. 1830 agate, enameled gold British Museum |
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| Benedetto Pistrucci Cameo - King George III 1816 sardonyx, gold British Museum |
Texts above are reprinted in The Market edited by Natasha Degen, a volume in the series Documents of Contemporary Art from Whitechapel Gallery, London.