Sarah van Sonsbeeck

The material gold fascinates artist Van Sonsbeeck. Initially focussing on the notion ‘silence’ in her work she got inspired by the saying; ‘speech is silver silence is golden’. By translating the shape of the standard gold bar, Van Sonsbeeck invites us to redefine its value from the commodity of gold to the commodity of art. It’s a continuing balancing act between intrinsic value and intellectual value. As Isabelle Graw discusses in High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (2010), there is a difference between art and other commodities. Art is a special kind of commodity. Its market value is solely justified by its symbolic value. “The specific quality of its symbolic value lies in the fact that it expresses an intellectual surplus value generally attributed to art, an epistemological gain that cannot be smoothly translated into economic categories.” The intellectual surplus value of an artwork, associated with ideas, imagination, and perception is in turn linked to a personal value system constituted by the knowledge, interests, desires and memories of its buyer.