The Value Of Life To Imagine

From the point of view of Anthropology of art, based on the background of transcultural study, taking the Art market by the riverside of Saone in Lyon as the main researching field and the Barbizon village of painters near Paris as the secondery one, both of which in France, this dissertation aimes to topic on art, artists and art works, and the cultural sense caused by the changement of identity of people and objects in the art market in different context. It discusses the art market, the creation and marketing of art, the aesthetics and consumption of art, art and life, the connection between the characteristics of art work and the artist's personal life, experience and social relationships. As an oversea case study of Anthropology of art, this research is innovative compared with the former researches on art market by art history, art theory, economics, sociology, anthropology and cultural study, either from the role played by the author and the perspective of the observation, or from the object and method of the research.The content of the dissertation is mainly composed by "Value", "Life" and "Imagination". In the part of "Value", it tries to discover the different meaning of "Value" in modern society, in the art market, in the concrete fieldwork of this research than of in traditional study of economics. It finally returns the discussion of "Value" to the perspective of anthropology.In the part of "Life", through the interviews of the artists and consummers in the art market, by recording their views on art, art works and art market, their understanding of life, it searches for the connections between the characteristics of art and the artist's personal life, experience and social relationships, including their opinons of the aesthetic, consumption and collection of the art works.In the part of "Imagination", with the concern of the anthropological and transcultural study in theories on Other, immagination and the Society of the Spectacle it focuses on the imagination from "Other"——the people in the market, who is the object of this research, including their recognition of their own art and culture, their immaginary of an oriental world with China in it, their opinions on different trends of art and the standard of the definition and so on. After the presentation, analysis and discussion of the fieldwork in the former 3 main chapters, responding to the first part, which refers a lot to the definition and analysis of market and value, it develops the main sense of the whole essay and makes further reflection in the last part, especially sums up the connection and difference between the researches of both economics and anthropology on the topic of value, which results a conversation between the two subjects.