A business anthropological approach to the study of values: Evaluative practices in ceramic art

Abstract

This article describes and analyses preparations for the holding of an anthropologist potter's one-man show in a Japanese department store. It has two aims: first, to show the methodological and analytical strengths of business anthropology and second, to propose a sociological theory of multiple values that goes beyond economists’ simplified theory of value that is dependent solely on price. Based on participant observation, the article describes the strategic planning of, and preparations for, the fieldworker's own pottery exhibition in a department store located in northern Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands and home to a long tradition of porcelain and stoneware production. In so doing, it focuses on the main players in the ceramic art world; the social interaction underpinning an exhibition; the conflicting ideals of ‘aesthetics’, display and money (pricing); and the ways in which different sets of values, and evaluating processes, affected the reception of the author's work. It concludes by developing a theory of values that could be usefully applied in fields such as cultural economics, consumer theory and design research.

Keywords:

• aesthetics
• art world
• business anthropology
• ceramics
• display
• evaluative practices
• exhibition
• framing
• pricing
• values

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the Strategic Research Council of Denmark for funding the writing up of this research as part of its 4-year 9-month grant for the study of the socio-economic organization of creative industries (2007–2011). I would also like to thank one anonymous reviewer, in particular, for his or her helpful critique, advice and patience in commenting on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

The research in question was funded by the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and the Economic and Science Research Council, UK, in 1981–1982.

In this respect, as an outsider to the ceramic art world, I was deemed to be ‘safe’.

That Miyamoto should have even considered allowing an amateur like myself to hold his own one-man exhibition revealed, even though it was closed in, the fluid nature of the contemporary ceramic art world in Japan at that time (Rosenberg 1970, 388).

The Ura-Senke school of tea was the most prominent at the time of my research.

At the time of the exhibition, the dollar-yen exchange rate was: US$1 = ¥248.

In order to enable my readers to gauge how this top price of $400 compared with prices charged by other potters in Japan, let me add that Kajiwara Jirō in Koishiwara would have priced a similarly sized stoneware pot at about $600 and Tanaka Kakuei (at whose kiln I made porcelain wares) a porcelain dish at $800, while a comparable Imaemon XIII overglaze enamel porcelain bowl would have been on offer at between $1600 and $2000. Stoneware tea bowls by Arakawa Toyozō, the holder of an ‘important intangible cultural property’ (jūyō mukei bunkazai), on the other hand, were retailing at approximately $24,000 in the same year.

In Hutter and Shusterman’s (2006, 199) terminology, ‘art-technical’ value.

See Vollard (1978, 185) for similar examples of the uses to which Cezanne's paintings were once put by their owners.