What's it worth?

I play a game with myself sometimes. In department stores, I scan a display of shoes and rank them in order of most to least desirable. Then I flip them over and look at the price. When their value falls more or less in line with my preferences (the most expensive being the most desirable), I’m momentarily validated in the belief that I am a worldly sophisticate with discerning taste. When my guess is off, I experience the kind of plebian shame that only choosing Jessica Simpson over Yves St. Laurent can inspire.

I bring this up because despite righteous insistence to the contrary, most us of have trouble separating our more abstract conception of a thing’s virtue from the carnal influence of monetary worth. Nowhere, I suspect, is this phenomenon more true than in the art world. And nowhere is it more visible than at a high-class art fair, where the bluer the chip and the bigger the name, the more desirable the piece.

Few of us, if plucked from a cultural vacuum and shown a display of contemporary art, would rank Damien Hirst’s, “A Mother and Child Divided” (a bisected cow carcass preserved in formaldehyde) among the most desirable. But flip it over, so to speak, and things might change. That multi-million-dollar price tag may lead to a newfound appreciation for the piece. Hirst is a big draw at swank art fairs like Art Basel Miami, where the focus tends more toward the embellishment of investment portfolios than walls.

It was the Miami fair that inspired the conception of Beyond the Border International Contemporary Art Fair (www.beyondtheborder-art.com), a much-publicized event that’ll be held at the Grand Del Mar during the first week of September. Executive director Ann Brechtold explains that she was struck by the transformative effect Art Basel had on Miami, a city she sees as bearing several cultural similarities to San Diego. A fair like Beyond the Border—which will showcase artwork by prestigious national and international galleries—has the potential to “elevate San Diego’s cultural status,” says Brechtold, by bringing in revenue to the area and encouraging collectors.

She’s probably right. Despite the effect the recession has had on the art market, there are still plenty of people who view art as a solid, long-term investment. And an event of this caliber can only help San Diego’s chance of making it onto the map as a cultural destination. But despite all the fair’s potential positives, it’s difficult to dispatch with cynicism after reading through the promotional materials.

Dollar signs are everywhere. Beyond the Border promises “over $4 million dollars of investment-grade art,” offers a $10,000-a-table VIP dinner (although, in fairness, it’s hosted by the nonprofit California Bipolar Foundation) and boasts sponsors like Maserati, Modern Luxury and Lugano Diamonds. A symposium series features subjects like “Art as an Alternative Investment,” led by a former hedge-fund manager, and “The Art of Living,” an exhibition of luxury items including cars, watches and jewelry.

Such exclusionary names and numbers might lead one to question exactly what borders the fair is trying to transcend, but Beyond the Border actually takes its name from the concurrent event of one of its sponsors, Qualcomm.

ReEnVisioning a World Beyond Borders is a Qualcomm project designed to “showcase the artistic and social networking capabilities of 3G technology” in which people age 15  to 28 are invited to submit cell-phone photos from around the globe. A telecommunications company encouraging a key demographic to relate to the world through cell phones? No room for cynicism there.

But Beyond the Border will also feature a talk given by cultural critic Dave Hickey, who, in 1993, ignited a firestorm by suggesting that art should be beautiful and that looking at it should be a pleasurable experience. His detractors balked at the idea that something so crass as aesthetics would figure more importantly than meaning in art. But our obsession with meaning, Hickey argued, specifically as it’s constructed by the public institutions that dictate art education and exhibition, obstructs the experience of connecting directly with art. Meaning is a cerebral construct, an external form we impose on art, whereas the pleasure of experiencing something beautiful is pure and unmediated.

Following that logic, I’m led to wonder if situating art within the context of a high-end investment opportunity doesn’t add a fixation on capital as yet another obstruction between us and the experience—and whether there’s any value in encouraging and heightening the culturally trained tendency to conflate virtue and worth.

Caught up in a tide of idealistic sentiment, I momentarily indulge the fantasy of Hickey taking the stage at the Grand Del Mar to denounce private companies as the arbiters of artistic worth as he criticizes public institutions for holding similar sway over artistic meaning.

“I don’t know what Dave’s talk will be about,” Brechtold says. “He hasn’t shared it with us.” She goes on to point out that Hickey has long spoken out against the over-academic nature of the institutional art world “in favor of art fairs as a way to see art in an unpretentious setting without the snobbery.” But it’s hard to imagine that an event like this could really hope to free art from the confines of pretension. Or that staging it at a luxury resort in the heart of Del Mar could have much cultural resonance throughout the larger framework of the city.

Whoops, there goes that cynicism again.

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