Into the Ether

In 1983, Lewis Hyde published The Gift, a meditation on gift economies where art and ideas escaped the indignity of a market value. As a poet, he wanted to show that "the commerce of the creative spirit" could not flourish as pure commodity exchange. His advice on how an artist might feed herself under capitalism was thin, but as historian Jackson Lears noted, "[I]t is unfair to upbraid him for the unavoidable banality of his advice. What he has done is to freshen stale thinking about consumer culture by reminding us that the focus for criticism should not be material goods but the attitudes people bring to their exchange." Our public life in enriched, Hyde argued, by the gift relationships inherent in producing art, sharing research, or giving blood. Some kinds of value are lost on the auction block.