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Summer. To borrow someone else’s well-articulated diagnosis, it is the season of broken promises, and – to add my own caveat – a blessed time for much needed reveries. In this characterization, there is of course a tinge of a very personal background condition that dates back to school and university years, where summers signalled a much awaited relief to my unhinged cortisol levels, but ultimately became encoded as the defining season of ‘hard landing’ where the tedious drudgery of work experience, odd jobs and the anticlimax of leisure served as bona fide reasons for full-blown existential crises and escapist daydreaming. While attempting to disengage from this coming-of-age-Catcher-in-the-Rye-bordering-on-Nausea most generic condition in later years, the affective-cognitive imprint of summer has continued to haunt even today’s professional projections.

In the professional contemporary art calendar (and my subjective, but certainly generalizable experience of it), summer is paradoxically both the season of consolidation and a period for speculative drift. Let me explain. On the one hand, summer is the time of Venice, documenta, Basel (as well as whatever has managed to squeeze itself in-between); an onslaught of contemporary art that cannot but leave one slightly distraught by the sphere’s remarkable resistance to reform. On the other hand, summer is also a point in one’s annual work trajectory where one has literally dug (read: researched, curated, written) oneself into a deep claustrophobic hole (in part, through mental exhaustion). This is the moment where the expansive coherency of a built-up conceptual scheme however many months ago fully in-lapses, but equally a moment where the remaining single obsession nuance becomes so powerful that one starts truly believing in its psychic powers.

For a couple of years (and consecutive summers), financialization has been the apple of my curatorial eye. This has basically meant that I took 99.9 percent of the said time trying to understand (in a haphazard, that is, truly curatorial way) the Investopedia basics of the phenomenon and 0.1 percent of the time starting to develop a view from contemporary art. I will spare you all the dry details of what the latter entails, but just to make sure that we remain on the same page, it is not a narrative of evil usurpation and a call to cleansing, quite the contrary. What is important for current purposes is that the single point obsession pivoting the summer of 2017 has been an idea developed by Michel Feher and presented in the final lecture of his truly seminal series The Age of Appreciation: the Neoliberal Condition.1 Here is the idea: with financialization, we have entered the ‘age of appreciation’, meaning that those who create the metrics for investment-worthy ventures, that is, rating agencies, are the hidden power players of the financial regime. Why is this idea so striking and of what use is it to the (fatigued of itself) world of contemporary art in high summer?

As we all know (or are tired of hearing), financialization has spurred on a reorientation from an economy organized around (industrial) production to one that is structured according to the interests of financial circulation. The transition has a very specific historical trajectory dating from at least the post-Second World War period, and in the corporate sphere, it has meant a shift in emphasis from profit maximization to raising capital value, that is, the shareholder value of stock. To this extent, financialization has explicitly placed the power into the hands of the investor class that selects what can be produced by either opening or blocking access to the realm of circulation, and implicitly into the hands of those who have the capacity and scalability to shape and normalize the criteria of accreditation for investment-worthy ventures, that is, rating agencies. This means that while illiquid subjects or entities that do not hold capital are least capable of achieving influence due to their relatively marginal power as investors (unless they want to try their luck as investment-worthy ventures), Feher suggests that today’s most urgent collective project is to produce agencies (in both meanings of the term) that can redefine what investment-worthiness means, and to actively compete with existing players at this semantic-organizational level.

The question of valuation in contemporary art has over the last seven to eight years gone from a mystified phenomenon that we do not talk about (the era of Isabelle Graw’s High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture, 2010) to combustive conversations around the importance or problem of retaining opaque valuation mechanisms as a way of ‘protecting art’2 to widely acknowledged and even yawned at set of valorisation mechanisms that a platform like Artsy writes about.3 Perhaps, in some circles, it is still a bit uncomfortable to talk about institutional exhibitions and inclusion in important collections as positive appreciation processes in valorising an artist’s career (or artist’s career as capital), but generally this seems to be a very basic premise of today’s contemporary art reality, that apart from being mobilized for its most obvious ‘benefits’, we do not really do enough with. I guess I better define the ‘we’. Here, ‘we’ is a collective reference to all those who understand that the field of contemporary art needs to reform itself, if not just for ideological reasons (being the handmaiden of neoliberalism and all that), then for sustainability and diversity reasons alone. It is clear that the manner in which liquidity is distributed today across institutional and professional actors of the field can only benefit top-end actors (hence, all the mergers in the primary market as a means to survival), which has grave implications for what the field will ultimately shape up to be. This is where Feher’s ground-up rating agencies idea launches one into speculative daydreaming about the scenarios of its application in contemporary art. Effectively, we already have rating agencies, yet, they might not be aware of themselves (or not want to perceive themselves) as such, and might need some persuasion as far as redefinition of current criteria of accreditation are concerned.

Contemporary art’s rating agencies are distributed across a myriad of agents such as important curators, dealers, institutions, publications, collectors (with the latter also being the investors), and artists, of course, some of them being weightier than others. They are the ones defining and maintaining criteria for accreditation that deem anything to make inside the charmed microcosm of contemporary art worthy of investment (financial, but also cultural). On the surface, the distributed nature of contemporary art’s rating agencies may appear to be a positive phenomenon that would guarantee diversity and constant back-and-forth on the criteria of accreditation. In fact, lack of financial diversification (both, in terms of sources of funding and models of funding) is leading the field in the opposite direction. The safest (most low-risk) route for survival under such conditions is to amplify the activity of weightier actors, which as mentioned above, is a positive feedback loop that can only mean more conservatism. Therefore it seems essential to start setting off positive feedback loops through criteria of accreditation that can encompass infrastructural transformations for the field (for example resale rights, equitable pension schemes for freelancers, et cetera) and start redefining art’s relationship to reality at large (for example less projects more long-term commitments, et cetera).

Some of these things are already happening (for example whether it is Working Artists and Greater Economy or practices that are shifting away from the object-based logic of contemporary art), however, so far they are marginal curiosities. The psychic power of Feher’s thesis lies in its lesson for contemporary art: there is already a tool-kit available here for political agency in the age of appreciation, whether or not (and how) it is going to be used will ultimately determine which art world becomes just pure finance and which will have the capacity to do finance in order to make a difference.