François Tugores, Nicolas Laroche, and Benoît Jourdan, “Les dépenses culturelles des collectivités territoriales en 2010: 7,6 milliards d’euros pour la culture,” Culture Chiffres, no. 3 (2014):1–32.81 81. Marie Gouyon and Frédérique Patureau, “Vingt ans d’évolution de l’emploi dans les professions culturelles,” Culture Chiffres, no. 6 (2014): 1–24.
82 82. Chantal Lacroix, “Les dépenses de consommation des ménages en biens et services culturels et télécommunications,” Culture Chiffres, no. 2 (2009): 1–7.
83 83. Olivier Donnat, Les pratiques culturelles des Français: enquête 1997 (Paris: La Documentation française, 1998), pp. 221, 279, 291.
84 84. Peter Laslett, Finnish Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 43.
85 85. Pierre Ansart, Marx et l’anarchisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969).
86 86. See for example Harry Bellet, Le marché de l’art s’écroule demain à 18 h 30 (Paris: Nil, 2001); Daniel Granet and Catherine Lamour, Grands et petits secrets du monde de l’art (Paris: Fayard, 2010); and Don Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
87 87. See especially Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art between the Market and Celebrity Culture (Berlin: Sternberg, 2009); Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008); Pierre-Michel Menger, The Economics of Creativity: Art and Achievement under Uncertainty, trans. Stephen Rendell et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [2009] 2014); Nathalie Heinich, Le paradigme de l’art contemporain: structures d’une révolution artistique (Paris: Gallimard, 2014).
88 88. See Daniel Aaron Silver and Terry Nichols Clark, Scenescapes: How Qualities Shape Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
89 89. See Olaf Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
90 90. See Alain Quemin, Les stars de l’art contemporain: notoriété et consécration artistique dans les arts visuels (Paris: CNRS, 2013); on rankings of personalities, see especially pp. 205–76.
91 91. Art collectors themselves are ranked, particularly in terms of their notoriety and their visibility, on the site Larry’s List (www.larryslist.com).
92 92. According to the highly successful model presented by Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More than the Rest of Us (New York: Free Press, 1995).
93 93. Jean-Jacques Arrighi and Marjorie Martin, “Grand Arles: des difficultés à surmonter, des atouts à exploiter,” Insee études, no. 31 (2013).
94 94. See Jean-Maurice Rouquette, ed., Arles: histoire, territoires et cultures (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 2008).
95 95. The statistics in this section come from Rouquette, Arles, and Arrighi and Martin, “Grand Arles.”
96 96. According to the magazine Bilan (November 30, 2012).
97 97. See the reports of the Boston Consulting Group (www.bcg.com) and Gabriel Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [2013] 2015), pp. 29–30.
98 98. On the problems that this two-track consumption poses to the mass distribution sector, see Philippe Moati, L’avenir de la grande distribution (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2001) and La nouvelle révolution commerciale (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2011).
2 Toward Enrichment
The characteristics of an enrichment economy
The domains covered by an enrichment economy are not simply appended to the sectors of an industrial economy as add-ons that contribute, each in its own way, to a global bottom line. The enrichment economy is characterized by special features that have wide-reaching economic and social consequences. It is based on mechanisms that are in many respects quite different from those of an industrial economy. To prepare for the detailed analyses that follow, let us begin with an overview and several examples.
The prices of industrial products – articles intended for use – tend to go down sharply over time; the uses made of them are presumed to reduce their performance (used cars are exemplary in this respect). The short- or long-term fate of a standard industrial product is to become trash. This is so much the case that the question of trash and its disposal has become a major concern for industrial societies.
Conversely, the things at the heart of the enrichment economy may have long been treated as trash – forgotten, left behind in attics, abandoned in basements, or buried in the ground. A large percentage of the things we admire in museums or in other places where precious collections are displayed, perhaps even all such things, as the anthropologist Michael Thomson suggests in his seminal work Rubbish Theory,1 have been treated as trash at one point or another. More generally, the most pertinent things in an enrichment economy may see their prices go up over time – the opposite of what happens to industrial products. It is precisely the work of selection between what is destined to be abandoned or destroyed and what is destined to be preserved that is at the heart of the activities, and the anxieties, of those responsible for taking inventories of a given heritage, those who, confronted with any of the objects belonging to the unlimited universe of things that are candidates for survival, have to make crucial decisions concerning their fate.2
In fact, the objects of the highest value in an enrichment economy are not intended to meet needs or even, in many cases, to be used; instead, they take on their importance with reference to a different configuration in which the logic of collection is central. This is true for objects from antiquity and for works of art, of course. But it is also true for many products of the luxury industry. Even if the latter may episodically satisfy a need, they are not primarily acquired to be used. Those who acquire them often already own a number of functionally similar objects (several high-end automobiles, for example, or a large number of handbags from the top designers); they are accustomed to surrounding themselves with expensive objects and putting themselves on display in front of others. Going back at least to Thorstein Veblen,3 sociologists and economists, while denouncing the conspicuous consumption of luxury products, have sought motives behind the phenomenon. One such motive is clearly the “distinction effect,” the desire to set oneself apart, to stand out. Nevertheless, it seems that expensive items are often stored away without being exposed to the eyes of others, and, when serious collectors are involved, even out of the owner’s sight, since there are so many of them. It would appear, then, that such objects are accumulated mainly to be kept, sometimes to be contemplated in solitude, and placed in relations of proximity with other objects of the same kind in a logic that closely resembles the logic of collecting for its own sake.
Filling cellars with extraordinary wines offers a particularly striking illustration of this type of accumulative behavior. Aimed at acquiring complete series, the behavior is driven by a concern with filling gaps within sets that are being constituted. Wine collectors will seek, for example, to acquire all the vintages that were produced between two selected dates, or that meet certain standards, or that come from certain vineyards.4 The desire to possess specific items to fill gaps defined with reference to an ideal totality constitutes one of the principal motives governing behaviors in communities of collectors.
