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Erica Gilbert-Levin

At the Venice Biennale, which opened in early June, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's work was on display to be seen and experienced. At Art Basel International, which opened this week, another Allora and Calzadilla work is on display – but this time it comes with a price tag, and a hefty one at that. ("At the Venice Biennale," the WSJ observes, "you look. At Art Basel, you buy.")

Allora and Calzadilla, the young, relatively unknown but up-and-coming collaborative duo from Puerto Rico, have been generating international discussion and controversy with their highly political, in-your-face multimedia art, their techniques ranging from installation and performance art to sculpture and photography. Their piece at the Art Basel is entitled "Scale of Justice Carried by Shore Foam" and is on sale for $175,000 to $200,000 at the Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris. The work features a "scale of justice" which "teeters precariously out of balance atop the turbulent crest of a handcrafted sculpture of foam," according to the description provided by Art Unlimited, the Art Basel program that is hosting Allora and Calzadilla's work. "The image of foam by the seashore has come to occupy the public imaginary more prominently in recent years as a result of countless media depictions of man-made catastrophes – from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the now annual flooding worldwide caused by global warning. With these ecological events cutting across national and territorial borders, the scale of justice has become an object of explicit struggle. Presented here in sculptural form, this ephemeral froth stands as the remains of something that has come to pass, frozen in time, with the final balance of the scale left undetermined." Explains Artnews.org: The work is "organized around the principle of physical and temporal displacement." Artnews adds that the artists are "privileging the aberrant, excessive, and disruptive workings of metaphors and other tropes to destabilize the functional stability of these ordering structures."

At the Venice Biennale, Allora and Calzadilla's six pieces spoke for themselves, raising questions about global economics and politics, international identity, and the military-industrial complex. Without an accompanying price tag, the works communicated in what might be perceived as a context of "purity" (to borrow from the discussion raised by Velthius in his essay "Talking Prices"), as the art's political statements and aesthetic value could be separated, at least in the public mind, from the perception of ulterior (read: economic) motive on the part of the artists. Of course, the absence of a price tag directly attached to the physical works was rather deceptive: At the Venice Biennale, the artists are, in fact, competing for a monetary reward. But the explicit motivation behind the Art Basel is to sell art. The question to ask, then, is whether Allora and Calzadilla's participation in an event that is organized around many of the very principles that their art challenges (economic exploitation, socioeconomic inequality, the capitalist drive behind war...all of which possess at their core an inextricable connection to market incentive and capitalism itself, which, of course, is behind the driving purpose of the Art Basel) undermines the capacity of their art to effectively ask these questions.

Perhaps the artists' participation in this venue points to their courage – they are challenging the underlying values of the very system that has invited them in. Or perhaps their "against-the-grain" art work places Allora and Calzadilla resolutely in the tradition of many in the art world who situate themselves as outsiders, as avant-garde, as alternative or anti-establishment as a means to accumulate sufficient "symbolic power" to succeed financially, in the process we learned about from Bourdieu and Velthius. Whatever the case, it appears that Allora and Calzadilla are succeeding – both in what I believe is their sincere dedication to the principles of social justice that their art work embodies and in the competitive market place for art. It is possible that Allora and Calzadilla believe their messages can have more of an impact and reach wider audiences if they also succeed financially, and they are probably not incorrect in this perception.

"Scale of Justice Carried by Shore Foam" by Allora and Calzadilla