This labor, as I discussed earlier, can be put into place for the creation of art as well. The creation of art, like any economic production, requires inputs, a process by which those inputs are united, and at least one laborer who undergoes an act of creation to take the inputs and create a newly formed objecta commodity itself. This process takes time, or what Marx calls labor-time. Each unit of labor-time (typically expressed as an hour) has a certain cost, and that cost is embedded in the value of the final product. Therefore, those items that require similar inputs and similar time and energy should be relatively equal. There is a great deal of debate over the accuracy of labor theory of value, but in this case, it proves very useful because it helps take the creation of art, a diverse activity, and puts it on equal footing with other forms of labor in the sense that art can be reduced and picked apart to equally measurable units, even when comparing painting to writing a poem, fo

Use-value refers to the measurements of the productivity value of the labor or inputs. In labor theory of value, use-value is a concept developed in labor that essentially takes the components of a commodity and describes these components in a standardized way. For the sake of generality and ease, I will call the measure of this use-value utils instead of money since varying costs and representations of money can make a standardized measurement difficult. The notion of utility is vital to our understanding of commodity production and how it distributes inputs, money, and labor-time to various tasks in the creation of a commodity. If a painter is preparing to create a painting there are necessary and unnecessary items. The unnecessary items may cost more but yield more utils in the end and therefore have enhanced use-value. That may cost more but bring more utils to the project and, therefore, have enhanced use-value and can be applied a different measure than the necessary items.

In the scenario above, Marx may conclude that this creative value that erupts from the labor of the artist is in some sense a part of its surplus-value. Indeed, Marx argues that surplus-value arises when the laborer works past the point of subsistence to generate extra value that is in turn absorbed by the capitalist. In a similar way, we can argue that the artists surplus-value is found and retained as this type of creative energy that deposits itself in the work. As Heidegger said, The artwork is, to be sure, a thing that is made, but it says something other than what the

The work makes public something than itself; it manifests something other; it is an allegory. (Heidegger, 2008) This analysis reaffirms our previous claim that a work of art is not merely the physical canvas and the paint on it or the dancer and her stage. Instead, it is a deeper element that transcends mere physical lines of communication and draws upon the greater part of consciousness to transmit from the artist to art and from the art to the viewer. Now that I have defined the terms of our debate, it is time to return to the real world to generate a new theory. For Marx, because economic activity is social in nature, it is important to understand the placement of commodity within an economic system or marketplace. For Marx, this is primarily done through the distribution system of capitalist production. Marx provides a detailed discussion of this process in Grundrisse.