Doubling: there’s an escape from
commodification ...?
Hugo Letiche
Universiteit voor Humanistiek, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to pursue the themes of feminine identity, doubling and
(in)visibility; first in terms of “signifyin(g)” as a cultural and literary strategy, and second, in terms of
quilting seen from the fiction of Alice Walker to the quilting of Gee’s Bend. In the background, there
plays the relationship between art and commodification.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines “commodification” and “doubling” in the
case of the Gee’s Bend quilt makers. The quilts foreshadow the modernist aesthetic and are of the
highest aesthetic quality. They were made in a traditional rural society by very poor uneducated black
women. The quilts were not made to be sold, but were dedicated to familial remembrance and to
immediate aesthetic pleasure.
Findings – Commodification doubles self and work, life and object, uniqueness and standardization,
art and management. For the artist, the unicity, beauty, inspiration and creativity of art is doubled in
the sale, marketing, display, distribution and mass production of “art works.” Making art is intimate,
personal and individual; selling art requires public display, pleasing the all-important customer(s) and
dealing with many sorts of in-betweens. What “commodification” is on the artist/art work level, is
“doubling” on the I/me, self/persona, private/public, and in-group/out-group level.
Originality/value – The author proposes, from the example of quilt-making, a wide-ranging
interrogation: “Is escape from commodification possible?”
Keywords Arts, Race, African Americans, Literature
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
There is a chasm between the commercially determined sign and the aesthetically
produced signifier. Selling, exploiting, and marketing deal in the signs of branding;
artists at work play, experiment, and create with their signifiers. Art does not shout for
MBA-trained managers to takeover, but that the artistic competencies involved in the
creating of beauty have increasingly been in demand in organizing. “Art firms” or
organizations that are artistic supposedly involve flow, joy, creativity or a concentration
and commitment that can be called (aesthetic) or “philosophizing” (Guillet de Monthoux,
2004; Venkatesh, 2001). But are the key values of managing really compatible with those
of artistic creation? If art involves “aura” or the unicity of circumstance and personal
commitment; and managing involves standardization, massification and efficiency, can
they meet and cooperate (Bjo
¨
rkman, 2002)? If art and management ought to come
together in “brand management,” then art and management may simply be “bad
bedfellows” (Pelzer, 2006). Admittedly, the artist is doubled between her (or his) self and
her (or his) work. There is the replication of the “I” in the persona found in the artwork
and of the creative spirit of the artist in her or his strategy to economically get along in
life. Does the replication of the creative spirit in sellable objects, compromise the space
for beauty, epiphany and/or Schwung?
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1746-5680.htm
SBR
4,1
8
Society and Business Review
Vol. 4 No. 1, 2009
pp. 8-25
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1746-5680
DOI 10.1108/17465680910932432