Value

When it comes to art, if there's anything I don't immediately understand or 'get', I usually try to think of it in terms of a musical equivalent. Not that I have any particular gift or insight when it comes to music, it's just that it's the one form that I've studied - in a decidedly non-academic fashion - for forty years.

For example, Rothko's marvellously deep paintings only made sense to me when I thought of them in terms of ambient music. Warhol's repetition can be likened to some of Philip Glass's works, and piles of bricks lying around in galleries can, neatly and poetically, be seen as analogous to elements of Einstürzende Neubauten's output. (It works for other disciplines, too: Salman Rushdie's writing seems like opera to me: technically brilliant, beautiful in places, but not something I want to sit through.)

And when it comes to the question of value in art, I can look at that in musical terms, too. Back in the eighties, the value of an artist's release was largely dictated by the record companies. A single was 99p, a 12" was £1.99, and an album was £3.99. (A double album would have have been £5.99, I think, but I didn't buy many of those and I can't remember.)

However, the true, underlying value could be seen at record fairs, such as the ones my friends and I regularly attended on Sunday mornings. Here you might pick up chart surplus albums quite cheaply. Because records were cheap to manufacture but had a high retail value, the releases by popular artists would over-pressed, so there was no danger of the retailers running out. As the chart moment passed, some of the surplus would find its way to record fairs and market places.

Conversely, the limited editions and deleted pressings would steadily go up in value. I remember gazing longingly at copies of Tubeway Army's 12" release of 'Down In The Park' but unable to bring myself to hand over the asking price of £15. Here, in its most basic form, was a clear demonstration that an object's worth was what someone was willing to pay for it. 

When CDs came along, the record companies still controlled the pricing, and for quite a while you could expect to pay £11.99 for a CD although this would be bumped up by as much as a fiver for album's like Michael Jackson's 'HIStory'. (Happily, not on my shopping list.)

The advent of Amazon, though, has seen this change, and now I can never be quite sure what I'm going to be asked to pay for anything when it comes to CDs (and, to a lesser extent, downloads). So, for example, last week, while preparing the radio show, I was reading about Blancmange and remembered that I hadn't got the original version of 'Waves'* anywhere.

A bit of Googling about revealed that after the vinyl pressing of their debut album (on which it featured), all releases used the subsequent single version (extra strings, new vocal), except the original is available on the 'Very Best Of Blancmange' double album. Cool, I thought, I'll just download that one song. Except it turns out that album isn't available in digital format. 

Well, I didn't really need another copy of their songs but then when I looked on Amazon, the double CD was so cheap that I bought it for that one track, which makes the value (to me) of that track £4.99, and the rest of the tracks worthless, if only as far as this purchase was concerned. 

Also, pictured is an album I'd never heard of - "There Is No Love" - by Rhodri Davies, David Sylvian, and Mark Wastell, which I came across last week. I don't have high hopes for it, to be honest, but it appears the value of satisfying my curiosity is ten quid.

*Just came across this amazing version on YouTube: a live performance on Top of the Pops, complete with asinine DJ introduction. 

****
-11.2 kgs
0 words