A collection is only valuable while somebody agrees to value it. That agreement is usually invisible, held in place by auction records and insurance schedules. Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, the HBO Max comedy that began on 23 July, opens with the agreement suspended, and the question it raises about cultural objects is older than the franchise it comes from.
The shop as a small institution
The premise involves a comic shop owner, played by Kevin Sussman, who damages a device built by three physicists and has to travel between collapsing worlds to repair it. Before the plot arrives, the setting does something quietly useful. It puts a room full of catalogued, sleeved, graded objects in front of an audience and asks what they are for.
A comic shop is a museum with a cash register. Both institutions perform the same four operations, and the resemblance is closer than either side usually admits:
- acquisition, governed by taste and by budget
- conservation, with the same anxieties about light, humidity and handling
- classification, which decides what counts as a significant object and what does not
- display, which is an argument about importance made in physical space
The difference is that a museum removes objects from circulation and a shop returns them to it. That distinction is the whole of the art trade compressed into one sentence.
Grading, provenance and the manufacture of value
Comics arrived at their own version of connoisseurship faster than most collecting fields. Third party grading assigns a numerical condition score, the object is sealed in a case, and the score travels with it as a permanent claim about quality. Two identical printings can differ in price by a factor of fifty because of a decimal point assigned by a stranger.
The art market performs a similar operation with softer language. Provenance, catalogue raisonné inclusion, attribution to a hand rather than a workshop. In both cases the object does not change. What changes is the strength of the collective agreement about it, and that agreement is produced by institutions with an interest in its stability.
Anyone who has watched an attribution move from workshop to master knows how quickly a wall label can rewrite a valuation. The comics world simply performs the ritual in plastic and prints the number on the front.
When the register stops working
Strip out the institutions and the question becomes practical. A rare object still exists. Its condition is unchanged. Whether it is worth anything depends entirely on whether the people left have any use for the agreement that gave it a price.
Cultural history offers a consistent answer, and it is not romantic. In collapsed economies, portable art tends to hold value longest, not because beauty is eternal, but because small objects with international recognition can cross borders in a coat pocket. Everything else falls back to use value. A painting becomes a board. A book becomes fuel or it becomes a book, depending on who is holding it.
What survives such episodes tends to be whatever somebody personally wanted to keep. The Warburg Institute library reached London in 1933 because individuals decided that a particular arrangement of knowledge was worth the freight. Collections do not survive because they are valuable. They become valuable again because they survived.
The joke and the point underneath it
The series treats the shop as a running gag about a man whose profession has become absurd, and the reviews have not been generous about how deeply it thinks. It holds 76 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes from 38 reviews and 68 out of 100 on Metacritic from 18 critics. The Hollywood Reporter found it slapdash and uninterested in its own invented worlds. RogerEbert.com considered the concept wasted.
The premise still contains a question worth taking seriously in a gallery or a saleroom. Every object in a collection carries two values that are usually confused. One is the price, which is a social fact and can evaporate in an afternoon. The other is the reason somebody wanted the thing in the first place, which cannot be graded, insured or resold.
Institutions spend most of their energy maintaining the first value. Individuals, when they are honest, collect for the second. The interesting collections are always the ones assembled by people who would have kept the objects anyway.
That is the test the comedy stumbles into without meaning to, and it applies well outside a shop full of comics. Take the market away and ask what you would still carry. The answer is your actual collection. Everything else was an investment.
Stuart Fails to Save the Universe streams weekly on HBO Max until 24 September.
Photograph: comic and anime store interior by Solomon203, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
