A Rule on the Sheet: Price and Date as Sanctioned Properties of the Artwork

Abstract

Recent philosophy of contemporary art holds that artists fix the properties of their works through public acts of sanction, and that rules are a medium in which such sanction is exercised — rules for how a work is displayed, conserved, and participated in. Price has not been treated as a domain that rules govern; where it appears in this literature, it appears as a consequence of rule-following, a fear attached to it, a constraint on it, or the transaction by which a work changes hands. This paper argues that a rule printed on the object can make price and date sanctioned properties of the work, and can make them verifiable by anyone who reads it. It presents a case: a practice that defines one printed sheet per day under a single rule, each sheet carrying a number, the date and price derived from it, and the derivation itself. It compares the sheet with three neighbors — a receipt that bears a resale rule beside the work, a watercolor that bears a price on the work without a rule, a canvas that bears a rule on the work as a permission — and shows that the sheet alone bears a rule on the work as a determination. Three objections from the current debate are met by distinguishing permissions from determinations, unsettled from settled notation, and a price's effect from its status as a property. The claim is confined to what the rule makes true of the object.