Markets are intersections of buyers and sellers brought together to exchange goods and services most efficiently, so the theory goes. In fact, markets are also connected to barter and exchange and to their underlying value: resourcefulness. We look at Nina Katchadourian and her artwork made on airplanes ("Seat Assignment") as an example of resourcefulness, Caroline Woolard’s Work Dress as an example of barter, and Elizabeth Cleland’s exhibition as an example of equivalencies created by markets. We introduce supply and demand, how the graphs are constructed, and how to think about shifts in supply and demand.

This chapter examines the ways in which areas such as luxury housing projects and enclaves are structured as luxurious, desirable and valuable by virtue of being unattainable by the general public. The nature of such “Veblen goods” is primarily to confer preeminent stature upon the owner; as such, they have to be strictly demarcated as being both desired by the majority of people, and also distinctly out of their reach. The chapter shows how dialectical tension between strong desire and distinct unattainability relies on a complex semiotics combining some of the elements of conviviality (safety, acceptance, comfort and well-being) with quite different elements of awe, superiority and rejection.