The Product Worlds of Art

Original artworks may technically be commodities, but they are fundamentally distinct from the vast world of consumer goods that surround them—this, at least, is the widely shared sentiment of artists, critics, curators, and historians alike. And yet the art system is littered with products, from petty museum merchandise to fashion and lifestyle objects made by artists, from numbered editions and posters to multiples, not to mention the myriads of vernacular objects circulating outside the normative art market. Whether as originals, licenses, counterfeits, or hybrid mutations thereof, the consumer product looms over contemporary definitions of art at a level of both objecthood, production, and exchange—so why is art history and the museum hesitant to pay attention to it at the level of reception? This panel welcomes presentations and discussions featuring art products from across the global 20th and 21st centuries so as to identify key conceptual issues in a two-fold task: to theorize art objects as consumer goods and/or products as kinds of art. From questions of originality and authorship to the numerous social and geographical politics of marketizing things called “art,” the session convenes around the clear sense that art products are decidedly not (just a kind of) design or merchandise. The session welcomes case studies that point to how this simple, if enduring, distinction leads art to self-generate a vast range of consumer goods—objects that, while rarely rendered precious or art-historically worthwhile, may reach the lives of many more people than “proper” artworks ever did.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Jeppe Ugelvig, History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz, jugelvig@ucsc.edu