The Commodification of Time in Two Art Worlds

This article examines how people successfully claim expert status in the art worlds of tattooing and opera by commodifying the time they have spent becoming experts in those art worlds. Temporal commodification happens along five dimensions: educational time, autodidactic time, consumption time, contiguous consumption time, and painful time. In essence, aesthetically-oriented individuals can successfully claim expert status in a given art world when they can convince others that they have learned about a particular kind of art, that they have learned from a legitimate source, that they have spent sufficient time consuming this art, that they have spent this time in contiguous chunks, and that they appreciate the pain (both physical and affective) that often accompanies such consumption.