CHEYNEY THOMPSON
For What It’s Worth: Value Systems in Art since 1960
Curated by Thomas Feulmer & Lisa Le Feuvre
How can we attempt to understand the value systems that surround us and guide our lives?
With this question, For What It’s Worth: Value Systems in Art since 1960 brings together 80 artists from across generations and geographies to explore one of the most urgent concerns of our time: the growing challenges to value systems that have arisen out of confrontations with social, political, and cultural power structures. Grounded in the international conceptual art tendencies of the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition builds on the strategies of this era that continue to reverberate through art and the world today.
All exhibitions presented at The Warehouse begin with works from The Rachofsky Collection. The starting point for this project was a desire to look more closely at conceptually oriented work in the collection, and to consider important works by Giulio Paolini, Jiro Takamatsu, John Latham, Mario Merz, Judy Chicago, Piero Manzoni, Sherrie Levine, Mona Hatoum, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Works by these artists act as guideposts for a series of themes that play out over the 16 galleries of The Warehouse.
Embedded in many contemporary social shifts, protests, psychological traumas, and philosophical questions is a vibrating awareness that current value systems are deeply in flux. Our hope is that the experience of the exhibition unfolds as a series of conversations around the systems that embed values within society. The exhibition begins outside the building and in the lobby, where the transition from outside to inside announces the values of the art institution with works that reflect on this in-between space. Works in the first few galleries raise questions about the individual and the group—or the one and the many—and the role that history and power play in these dynamics. The central gallery of The Warehouse, and the three galleries that follow, focus on the institutions of art, both the larger structures of the art world, as well as the historical and academic values surrounding art materials. From here, the exhibition expands outward, leaving the realm of art to look at the value systems that affect our contemporary understanding of the natural world, currency and the flow of value, and language and measurement. As the galleries progress, the exhibition centers on the human body—both as a social entity that is assessed by outside systems, and the physical, corporeal body itself as a site where values gather. The role of technology flows throughout the exhibition as a mode of communication and as the medium of works that look at cryptocurrency, NFTs, and video games. The exhibition ends with a gallery of works that probe the systems we use to give structure to the unknown—notions like mythology, the cosmos, and magic—revealing the strange, often poetic, gaps in a human understanding of the world.