Supply Chains and the Production of Value of Cultural Goods

Abstract

One of the ways that capitalism operates, at least in the realm of cultural goods, is by disciplining, or creating, forms of value that exist alongside it; these are forms of value that might be culturally viewed as something other than capitalist but actually are part of capitalism—camouflaged and stored forms of capitalist value that I theorize, following Pierre Bourdieu, as symbolic capital. Three case studies help make this argument: the rise of the virtuoso musician in western Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and their management by concert agents; the history of provenance as a form of value in the visual arts; and the process of designating a cultural practice as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, which shows how bureaucracies create a stored form of capitalist value as symbolic capital.