Record sums are paid for the icons of Modernism, young artists move up in no time to being high-income earners, while formerly celebrated artists are forgotten and their works lie dormant in depots of public collections that are bursting at the seams. Far from the polemics about art and money the exhibition “About the Value of Art” wishes, by means of selected positions from the collection of the Art Museum Graubünden, to find out more about the complex relationship between art and value. The works by Dieter Roth, Ingeborg Lüscher, Urs Lüthi, Fischli/Weiss or Ben Vautier are correlated with topics, about which we can approach the mystery of value. Transience, authorship, irony or sovereignty of interpretation are thereby only some of the aspects. What does Dieter Roth’s work that consists of food, which slowly decomposes, tell us about the meaning of material consistency? What insights does Urs Lüthi’s mystification about the role of authorship give us? What does the irony in the case of Fischli/Weiss tell us about artistic appropriation? What knowledge do we gain about the limitations of the art context, when we see Ben Vautier’s designed page in the national newspaper? It is now increasingly taken for granted that it should not only be the players of the art scene that pass judgement on the meaning of art. The general public of today also wants to be included in these processes. The exhibition should stimulate this discussion and at the same time make space for personal interpretations.

With Notta Caflisch, Franz Eggenschwiler, Fischli/Weiss, Karl Gerstner, Diego Giacometti, Camille Graeser, Lise Gujer, Alfonso Hüppi, Pierre Keller, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Verena Loewensberg, Ingeborg Lüscher, Urs Lüthi, Guido Nussbaum, Meret Oppenheim, Ulrike Rosenbach, Dieter Roth, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Gaudenz Signorell, Daniel Spoerri, André Thomkins, Ben Vautier, Not Vital, Andreas Walser, Lydia Wilhelm, Marcel Wyss.