Art as an inferior good or a good of Veblen

Consequences of the exhibition technique

Abstract

Leslie P. Singer stated, in one of her works, what for her was a sort of hierarchy within the art world. For her, the small galleries of cities without influence were the lowest step, followed by the galleries of important cities, the museums, and so on. According to her vision of the art world, the museums of big cities were the maximum to which an artistic piece could aspire. This vision of museums gave to those artworks a sort of almost sacred halo.
What is intended to be communicated through this article is the way in which current museum practices linked more to the public than to the object (its scientific and technical analysis), have subtracted that formerly halo. As it could not be otherwise, the approach will be carried out from a museum perspective, since such circumstance is the result of certain policies regarding the selection and use of exhibition techniques.
As a consequence, it will be argued that these exhibition techniques focused on the public rather than the object, entail that the economic separation between "inferior good" and "Veblen's good" that the museum had the possibility of establishing in the past, is now more questionable than never. The museological work and its internal selections determine, therefore, the halo and the categorization of the good economically speaking. If this premise is accepted, some derived questions arise, on which we will reflect briefly. Some of them, although not exclusively, will be: how does this affect the patrimonial wealth of a country and its museum system? How are the prices paid by public museums justified?