Broodthaers's Debt

Abstract

Abstract This essay investigates the status of “reification” in the work of Marcel Broodthaers, particularly in the 1971 “Section Financière” of his Musée d'Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles. It will pose finance and debt as social forms through which Broodthaers both experienced reification concretely and attempted to register its forming pressure upon the artwork's conditions of possibility. The article argues that it was Broodthaers's understanding of reification that allowed him, at a crux in the history of finance represented by the end of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971, to posit art as a speculative investment at once uncoupled from the concrete limitations of production and ever-more-tightly ensnared by the economic power of debt.