The Painted Desert: Aboriginal Art from Australia's Outback

Essay:
The painted desert
Author:
Geraldine Brooks
itzroy Crossing, in north-western Australia, is a group of
settlements set between
abrupt scarps of sandstone. The weather oscillates between the
furnace heat of
the dry season and the lashing rains of the wet, when saturated
rocks glow red
against lush grasses and wide swags of clouds hang above the
flood plain. Even by the
harsh measure of the outback it is a remote place – closer to
Jakarta than to Sydney.
F
The town was formed around 1900 and became known as the
only place for hundreds
of kilometres where the Fitzroy River was shallow enough to be
crossed on horseback.
The outpost now serves the region’s graziers and miners; most
of the residents, however,
are Aborigines who were forced off their lands by white settlers
during the past century.
For many years the town was impoverished and unlovely,
notorious for the brawls that

regularly erupted at the Crossing Inn – and for the carpet of
crushed beer cans that
spread so far in every direction that it became known as the
Fitzroy Snowfields. The
tinnies are gone now and the town has begun to achieve a
different reputation: it has
become home to a thriving community of contemporary artists.
The Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency, an Aboriginal co-
operative, is housed in an
unprepossessing strip of metal buildings next to a supermarket
and a takeaway food
shop. The sky was grey on the February day when I arrived for a
visit but inside the co-
operative two adjoining rooms were abloom with colour.
Vibrant paintings occupied
every centimetre of wall space and were stacked in piles on the
floor, ready for shipment
to forthcoming exhibitions in Sydney, Darwin and Perth. A
large canvas by one of the
centre’s best-known artists, Pijaju Peter Skipper, dominated a
far wall. The principal
colour of the painting is red, in homage to the soil of the artist’s
birthplace, and the canvas
is stippled with dots and crosshatchings that call to mind the
patterns of wind on sand or
the minute tracks of lizards. Bisecting this elaborate field is a
set of darker, more
prominent tracks: human ones. The painting is called Walking
Out of Country, and it is
Skipper’s lament for the exodus of his people, the Walmajarri,
from their homeland in the
Great Sandy Desert, a parched expanse south of Fitzroy
Crossing.
Not far from Skipper’s large painting hung a work by his wife,

Jukuna Mona
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 2 – Dreams of Land
© Copyright 2005 Griffith University & the author.
Chuguna, a handsome woman whose high cheekbones are
framed by a tumble of
lustrous curls. The theme is the same – lost country – but
whereas Skipper had applied
his paint in exact, economical dabs, Chuguna had swept hers
onto the canvas in wide
gestures that recall the way thick ochre body paint is applied by
thumb onto the breasts
of women dancers in clan ceremonies. Her work evokes, but
does not mimic, the action
paintings of mid-20th-century artists such as Willem de
Kooning.
In Walmajarri, one of the five Aboriginal languages spoken in
the Fitzroy area, a
mangkaja is a makeshift shelter of sticks and grass thrown up
for protection against the
rains of the wet season. The Mangkaja agency, which was
founded in the early 1980s, got
its name because the first art-related structure in Fitzroy was a
concrete-and-tin shed by
the roadside, which was paid for by a small government grant. It
was thought that
unemployed and idle Aborigines could carve boomerangs there
and sell them for a few
dollars to passing tourists. Instead, the Aborigines started
painting and became part of a
creative revival that has reshaped Australian art and drawn
record crowds at exhibitions

abroad.
At any time of day, the agency is a bustling place. The
atmosphere is part studio, part
day care centre, part old people’s home. An elderly woman
named Dolly Snell sat cross-
legged on the floor in front of a one-metre-square canvas,
applying thick rondelles of
yellow acrylic in patterns that resembled sharp blades of
spinifex. Her giggling
grandchildren played tag all around her, their swift feet
sometimes cutting across the
canvas, perilously close to the wet paint. Snell didn’t appear to
mind. In one corner,
another artist, Hitler Pamba, captivated an older group of
children with an account of his
childhood in the desert. (Hitler is Pamba’s “station name”, the
bleak joke of a white boss
for whom Pamba once worked as a cattle drover.) Speaking in a
mixture of
Wangkajunga, Walmajarri and Aboriginal “Kriol” English,
Pamba told the children how
he had recently visited the region where he grew up, which was
dotted with saltpans, the
dried-out remnants of ancient lakes. “No one’s lived there for
60 years but when I got
there I could still see our tracks leading across all that salt to
the place where we got
water,” he said. When Pamba paints, his pictures often re-create
this abandoned
landscape: opalescent expanses of bluish white are pierced by a
green swirl that
represents the vegetation surrounding the waterhole.
As Aboriginal painting has become popular with gallery owners,
Pamba and the other

members of the Mangkaja co-operative are able to sell much of
what they produce. This
year, the sale of works by Mangakja’s 50 painters is expected to
bring in almost half a
million dollars. The additional income is certainly welcome but
it has not alleviated the
poverty of the local Aboriginal community of some 1200
people. For this reason, the
artists in Fitzroy Crossing began a difficult discussion last year.
Perhaps it was time, some
suggested, to sell a pair of beloved canvases, Ngurrara I and
Ngurrara II. These densely
detailed paintings, which are the joint creation of dozens of
local artists, are widely
considered to be masterpieces. (Ngurrara, which means
“country” in Walmajarri, is
pronounced NUR-ara.) The paintings share surface similarities
with Western abstract art
– they have the energy of a Pollock, the exuberant colours of a
Matisse and the fanciful
geometric forms of a Miro – yet they are also intricate narrative
works that relate detailed
stories about the lives of the artists’ ancestors. The sale of these
celebrated paintings,
experts had said, could bring in a tremendous amount of money.
The Aborigines would not find it easy to allow these singular
records of local history
to be shipped thousands of kilometres away. Then again, the
outback is not an ideal place

to preserve fragile works of art. During a visit to a flimsy
prefab bungalow near the
Mangkaja centre, I had my first glimpse of Ngurrara II. “I’m
ashamed for you to see how
we are storing it,” Karen Dayman, who works as an adviser at
Mangkaja said to me. The
canvas, which is eight metres wide, had been rolled up inside a
rough-hewn wooden
crate on the bungalow’s veranda. This makeshift container had
been propped up on
plastic milk crates to protect the painting during the monsoon
season. Last year, it was
endangered by a flood. “The water was almost up to the top step
of the house,” Dayman
said. This year’s wet season had begun and, as we talked, a hard
rain drummed on the
bungalow’s tin roof and fell in sparkling curtains around the
veranda.
borigines have the world’s longest continuous artistic tradition.
And yet, as Wally
Caruana points out in the introduction to his book, Aboriginal
Art (Thames and
Hudson, 2003), it is also the last tradition to be widely
appreciated. In 1929, when the
surrealists made their map of the world, in which the size of
each country was dictated by
the degree of its artistic creativity, the Pacific islands, their
treasures then only recently
appreciated by the Parisian avant-garde, loomed large. Australia
rated barely a dot.
A

Yet Aborigines had painted rock walls 35,000 years before early
Europeans decorated
the caves of Lascaux. Long before white settlement, the range
of Aboriginal creativity was
immense. In the far north, groups made elaborate “x-ray”
paintings of animals on bark
and rock. In the north-west, they adorned cave walls with
images of Wanjina, the
powerful spiritual beings with huge eyes and no mouths, who
observed all things but
passed no judgements. When the white explorer George Grey
first saw depictions of
Wanjina, in 1837, he pronounced them “far superior to what a
savage race might be
supposed capable of”, and speculated that they might have been
painted by wandering
medieval knights.
Few whites ever saw the more ephemeral art forms of desert
Aborigines, such as
ground paintings, which were communal works fashioned
directly on the sand. They
were made during secret rites that celebrated the “creation
ancestors” – supernatural
beings who were thought to have formed every detail of the
landscape, from sandhill to
river bank. The entire continent, Aborigines believe, was shaped
by the prehistoric travels
of the creation ancestors; details about these epic journeys were
passed down in the

narratives known as Dreamings. Each Aborigine inherited
responsibility for a particular
Dreaming story and the parcel of land on which it took place. In
the desert, a ground
painting depicting a Dreaming traditionally employed dots of
ochre or tufts of plant fibre,
carefully placed by the individual who had inherited the right to
tell it. Soon after a
ground-painting ceremony ended, the image was obliterated. As
a result, much
Aboriginal imagery remained unknown to outsiders.
here are plant species indigenous to Australia, such as the
Hakea bakeriana, that bear
fruit only after the extreme stress of drought or bushfire. The
flowering of
Aboriginal contemporary art is a similar phenomenon. The
genre’s origins are typically
traced to the centre of the continent, in Papunya, a dusty village
240 kilometres west of
Alice Springs. After the government adopted a policy of
assimilation in the early 1950s,
nomadic Aborigines were forcibly resettled in Papunya. The
government offered the
town’s black residents squalid housing that was meant to
facilitate their integration into
white society. In 1971, a white schoolteacher named Geoffrey
Bardon arrived in town and
discovered a place of disease, violence and despair. Papunya
was, he later wrote, “a death
camp in all but name”.
T

As part of his instruction, Bardon, who died this year, gave his
pupils a small supply
of acrylic paint. It was not the students, however, but the town
elders who seized upon
this new material. Adult Aborigines, still reeling from
displacement and facing the threat
of cultural annihilation, used the paint to make a lasting record
of designs and images
that had previously been used only in clan ceremonies. For the
first time, the ancient
iconography of desert Aborigines was rendered in modern
mediums. At Papunya, the
pictorial vocabulary of ground paintings was transferred from
ochres to acrylics and from
desert earth to concrete walls. The graphic symbols have
multiple meanings. Concentric
circles can represent sacred rocks, camp sites or camp fires. U-
shapes signify both
humans and spirit beings. (This symbol is derived from the
shape left in the sand by a
person sitting cross-legged.) Bardon was delighted by what the
Aborigines created. He
encouraged the artists and brought them boards and canvas. He
could not satisfy the
Aborigines’ demand, however. Within a few months, almost
every flat surface in the
village, from old fruit boxes to hubcaps and floor tiles was
covered with acrylic paint.
Another transformation occurred around the same time,
hundreds of kilometres
away, in the area south of Fitzroy Crossing. The Great Sandy
Desert had been of little
interest to white cattle graziers and traditional Aboriginal life
survived there well into the
1950s. Skipper and Chuguna, the Mangkaja artists, were both

young adults before they
encountered a white person. Skipper, a self-confident man in his
seventies whose salt-
and-pepper beard extends to his impressive belly, recalled his
first brush with the
modern world: walking north to explore the rumoured world of
the cattle stations, he
saw an automobile. Skipper says he ran and hid in the bush –
afraid that the large eyes of
the strange beast might be able to see him.
Chuguna recalled a precarious childhood. During the dangerous
heat of the dry
season, mothers would leave their toddlers in a shady place
alongside a water-filled
coolamon while they foraged for kilometres on the blistering
sand, gathering wattle
seeds or ant eggs. One year, in the late 1950s, the wet season
rains were scant and
clan members were unable to store enough seeds and dried fruits
to ensure survival.
Skipper and Chuguna, who had just married, left home, walking
north in search of
work on the cattle stations.
The pair faced a second displacement following the equal-pay
decision in 1965. Station
owners, reluctant to pay higher wages at a time of collapsing
cattle prices, sacked their
Aboriginal workers and evicted many from the camps on their

lands. Aborigines drifted
toward the fringes of white towns, which offered little work but
plenty of alcohol. Fitzroy
Crossing, where Skipper and Chuguna finally settled in 1970,
was such a place; Turkey
Creek, to the north-east, was another. It was in Turkey Creek
that an artistic revival
parallel to the one at Papunya began. This time, however, it was
sparked by an
Aboriginal stockman named Rover Thomas.
homas’s interest in painting had spiritual origins. On Christmas
Day in 1974, when
Cyclone Tracey flattened Darwin, Aboriginal elders interpreted
the devastation as a
manifestation of the anger of the Rainbow Serpent, enraged that
white influence had
caused neglect of land and rituals. Thomas was one of many
Aborigines who reacted to
reports of the catastrophe in a metaphysical way. He told
friends and family that he had
been visited by a spirit who offered him a vision of a new ritual
called the Krill Krill. At
the first performance of this ceremony, dancers carried wooden
boards that Thomas had
designed with earth-toned fields of ochre.
T
Around the same time, a nurse named Mary Macha went to work
for the West
Australian Government’s Native Welfare Department. Her job
was to raise money for
impoverished communities by selling their crafts. At Turkey

Creek she met Rover
Thomas, who told her that he wanted to paint. Convinced of his
talent, Macha set up a
studio for Thomas in her garage in suburban Perth. She would
prop his pictures against
the fences in the narrow lane behind her house and sell them to
anyone she could
interest. Eventually, collectors started seeking out Thomas’s
graceful minimalist work.
Painted in natural earth pigments, their creamy browns and
blacks evoked the rounded
rock forms of the Kimberly Ranges nearby.
Wally Caruana, then a curator at the National Gallery of
Australia, was among the first
connoisseurs to appreciate Thomas’s spare and unusual
paintings. In 1984, he arranged
for the gallery’s director to meet Macha. Afterwards, Caruana
recalled, the director told
him: “You introduced me to a grandmother with a plastic
shopping bag, and in it were
the most marvellous paintings I’ve ever seen.”
The work had arrived just as there was an audience primed to
receive it. “We had
learned to appreciate contemporary movements such as abstract
expressionism and
minimalism, and then suddenly here is this work that has the
same aesthetic, yet is
loaded with multiple meanings,” Caruana said. The visual

correspondence between
Aboriginal works and modern art was all the more striking,
given that artists like Thomas
had never studied Western painting.
In 1990, Caruana invited Thomas to Canberra so that the artist
could see, for the first
time, an extensive collection of modern art. Caruana was
walking with Thomas through
the National Gallery when he suddenly stopped in front of one
painting. “Who’s that
bugger who paints like me?” he asked. The painting, 1957 #20,
by Mark Rothko, is eerily
resonant of Thomas’s work.
Thomas, who died in 1998, was quickly embraced by the
Western art market. A 1991
painting depicting a waterfall seems to bend the picture plane at
the point where the
channels of water reach the cliff edge and then cascade
downward. To Caruana, the
painting “represents the epitome of Thomas’s approach”. Two
years ago, he acquired the
work, titled All That Big Rain Coming from Top Side, for the
National Gallery of Australia,
for $778,500. The price remains a record for Aboriginal art sold
at auction.
homas’s success inspired many other Aborigines to paint. In
1992, his sister, Nyuju
Stumpy Brown, married Hitler Pamba and settled in a
community near Fitzroy
Crossing. Brown started to paint her own images of lost country
and Pamba followed

suit.
T
A neighbour, Pijaju Peter Skipper, began to make simple works
that reproduced
punarrapunarra – the kinds of repetitive patterns he might once
have incised on a shield.
Skipper’s sustained feelings of exile, however, eventually led to
a more profound form of
artistic expression. When he describes his work, he uses the
Walmajarri words wangarr
and mangi, which have no precise English equivalents. Wangarr
is the ghost image of
someone; mangi is a combination of the spirit and the physical
trace of a person, which
remains discernible even after he or she has left. When whites
mined the earth or made
roads, Skipper explained, “they scraped the mangi off the land”,
and the essence of the
past inhabitants was lost. For him, painting was a way to make
wangarr, or shadow
images, of what was now gone, and thus restore mangi. Skipper
began obsessively
painting the waterhole for which his father had been hereditary
custodian. Its distinctive
quatrefoil shape, rendered in acid greens or vivid oranges,
became a focal point in many
of his works.

In 1988, one of Skipper’s paintings was sent to New York for
the Asia Society’s
exhibition Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia. The
show drew the largest
attendance ever at the society and its enthusiastic critical
reception began to change the
way Aboriginal art was viewed. Although the paintings were
informed by thousands of
years of tradition, they were hardly folk art. Indeed, the
Aboriginal artists seemed rather
postmodern: painters like Skipper had cleverly appropriated old
imagery in order to
create something new.
In 1994, Sotheby’s ratified this emerging view by including
Aboriginal paintings in an
exhibition of contemporary art. Until then, Aboriginal works
had always been grouped
with ethnographic curios. The paintings attracted bidding from
all over the world.
Sotheby’s department of Aboriginal art has since blossomed;
sales at this year’s auction
reached $7.6 million.
im Klingender, the Sotheby’s expert who mounted the 1994
exhibit, leads a
bifurcated life, travelling between Sotheby’s clients – whom he
calls “the richest
200,000 people on the planet” – and Aboriginal communities,
where the living conditions
and the life expectancy rival those in the most dismal outposts
of the developing world.
T

I met him first just before the 2000 Sotheby’s auction, as he was
showing a
painting by the Papunya artist, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula,
to a preview crowd
at Sotheby’s Sydney gallery. In 1996, he said, he had been
called in to value works in
the estate of a Melbourne artist, Tim Guthrie. This painting,
Water Dreaming at
Kalipinypa, had been hanging over the washing machine in the
artist’s laundry.
Guthrie had bought it in 1972 for $150. It was, Klingender
declared, “a total
masterpiece”; the work’s mesh-like layering of stippled dots
only partly veiled secret
ceremonial objects and symbols that would become fully
obscured in later Papunya
works. Klingender’s sales pitch was effective: Sotheby’s had
already sold Water
Dreaming at Kalipinypa at auction in 1997 for $200,500. At the
2000 auction it sold
again to a New York collector for $486,500. Warangkula, who
died in 2001, received
nothing from either of the sales even though at the time of the
first sale he was
crippled, partially blind and destitute. Klingender pointed out
that the first sale had
revived interest in Warangkula’s art, allowing him to make a
good living in his final
years. Klingender also organised a charity auction that raised
more than a million

dollars for a dialysis clinic near the remote community of
Kintore where Warangkula
died. But the issue of a resale royalty for Aboriginal artists
remains a sensitive one
every time art sold at auction realises such staggering sums.
Last year, Klingender received a telephone call from Karen
Dayman, the adviser for
the Mangkaja co-operative. The artists in Fitzroy Crossing, she
said, were considering
selling one of the Ngurrara paintings. Klingender says his initial
reaction was dismay that
the works might leave the community. The Ngurrara canvases,
he said, were “among the
greatest works of indigenous art ever created”; moreover, they
had a powerful political
significance for the people of the Great Sandy Desert.
In 1992, the Mabo decision first recognised the right of
Islanders and
Aborigines to claim legal ownership of their ancestral lands –
provided that they could
show evidence of an enduring connection with them. Frustrated
by their inability to
articulate their arguments in courtroom English, the people of
Fitzroy Crossing decided
to paint their “evidence”. They would set down, on canvas, a
document that would show
how each person related to a particular area of the Great Sandy
Desert – and to the long
stories that had been passed down for generations.
Ngurrara I, the first attempt, was a canvas that measured five by
eight metres and was
worked by 19 artists. It was completed in 1996. But Skipper and

Chuguna, in particular,
didn’t feel that it properly reflected all the important places and
stories, so more than 40
additional artists were enlisted to produce a more definitive
version. In 1997, Ngurrara II,
which was eight by 10 metres, was rolled out before a plenary
session of the National
Native Title Tribunal. It was, one tribunal member said, the
most eloquent and
overwhelming evidence that had ever been presented there. The
Aborigines could
proceed to court.
The case, however was caught up in a logjam of similar cases
contested by mining and
farming interests. Meanwhile, many of the elderly artists who
had worked on the
Ngurrara paintings were living out their last years in poverty.
Several died.
Dayman phoned Klingender to ask if he would come to Fitzroy
Crossing and explain
the mechanics of an auction sale to the artists, so that they
could make an informed
decision. In their conversation, Klingender and Dayman
discussed how a sale might
affect the community’s stalled land claim. “The work is so
significant that a government
institution will almost certainly want to try to buy it for the
nation and that would be
ironic, because the nation has yet to acknowledge the claim,”
Klingender said. He was
troubled by the thought that such significant paintings would
leave the control of their
creators – and be lost, as the land had been, to future
generations. Yet he concluded that a

sale would ultimately benefit the community, not least by
exposing its creativity to an
international audience.
In February, Klingender and Wally Caruana made the long
journey from Sydney to
Fitzroy Crossing, and I went with him. The flight to Broome
took eight hours. We then
headed east in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. A few kilometres
outside Broome, the road
called, in a typical display of wishful outback thinking, the
Great Northern Highway,
turned into a meagre, one-lane sliver of bitumen, frequently
submerged by sparkling
freshers of water that peeled backward, like breaking waves,
against the vehicle’s
immense wheels. The mangrove coast quickly gave way to the
pindan - vast, unpeopled
stretches of black buffle grass and golden sedge punctuated by
tall termite mounds. After
half a day of driving, we arrived at Fitzroy Crossing.
The night before the meeting to discuss the fate of the
paintings, Klingender drove
from Fitzroy Crossing to a settlement 16 kilometres away called
Bayulu where several of
the most prominent Mangkaja artists, including Skipper and
Chuguna, live in bleak,
unpainted concrete-block houses; their glassless windows barred
in response to break-ins
by local drunks and drug addicts.

In such communities, the earnings of someone like Skipper, who
paints irregularly
and might make $30,000 in a good year, are divided and shared
by an extended
family, many of whom have no income beyond welfare cheques.
Skipper and
Chuguna also have community responsibilities that limit their
artistic output.
Skipper, as an elder, is often called away on secret ceremonial
business. Chuguna
teaches the Walmjarri language at the community school and is
informal guardian
and carer of a number of young children.
A sign at the entrance to Bayulu proclaimed that no alcohol or
gambling was allowed
in the settlement but as Klingender’s vehicle churned up the
muddy road, scattering
packs of skinny dogs, several outdoor card games were in
progress. Skipper was
engrossed in one of them. The artists’ houses were as modest as
those of their neighbours
but many of them had used their extra income to purchase
refrigerators and washing
machines, as well as four-wheel-drive vehicles. Klingender told
the artists about the next
day’s meeting and offered to arrange transport for those who
needed it.
The sale of the Ngurrara paintings would bring the biggest
windfall yet to the area.
That evening, Klingender returned to Fitzroy Crossing and
discussed the paintings with
Dayman over a dinner of barramundi she’d caught in the nearby
river. He noted that

Ngurrara II was particularly valuable. “I don’t think you should
and I’m not advising you
to, but if you do sell the big one, I estimate that you’d realise
between a million and a
million and a half.”
T
he next morning, the artists who had created the Ngurrara
paintings gathered inside
an old mechanic’s shed in Fitzroy Crossing. None of them was
younger than 60,
some looked impossibly frail, leaning on the arms of younger
relatives or labouring
through the mud in wheelchairs. Inside the shed, a slight stench
of old motor oil mingled
with the scent of drying paint and human sweat.
After some discussion, a wangki, or decision, was reached.
Ngurrara II would stay, for
now, in Fitzroy Crossing. But as the sun beat down on the tin
roof and rising humidity
made the shed’s interior feel like a baker’s oven, a consensus
emerged that Ngurrara I –
which Skipper referred to as “that little shorty one” – “might be
a ‘little freer’ ”.
The artists decided to take a fresh look at Ngurrara I, which
many of them hadn’t

seen in years. It took three people to carry the canvas and
several more to unroll it
over the dingy carpet that covered the workshop’s earth floor.
Suddenly, the shed
was filled with the colours and forms of the desert: swirls, dots,
concentric circles,
serpentine curls. A strong, dark line with circular protrusions
bisects the canvas: it
represents the Canning Stock Route, a series of wells sunk by
white settlers in the
early 1900s for the convenience of inland cattle drovers. At the
base of the painting –
to the south-west, if you view the canvas as a map – Hitler
Pamba’s saltpan country
spreads out in his characteristics opalescent wash. The gestural
swirls of his wife,
Stumpy Brown, depict the waterholes that abut the livestock
path to the east. Just
above, Skipper’s signature quatrefoil, its acid green the
brightest hue in the
composition, draws the eye upward, cushioned by Chuguna’s
more muted, less
structured ovals. The sinuous curve of a snake spirit defines the
top of the canvas.
The elderly artists began slowly walking across the canvas,
pointing, their voices rising
with excitement. To anyone versed in the “Don’t touch”
conventions of Western art, the
sight of people walking on a masterpiece – in mud-crusted stock
boots – was startling. It
was also a reminder of how non-Western and non-materialistic
Aboriginal society
remains. After the artists had a chance to reacquaint themselves
with the painting,
Dayman introduced Klingender, who she said worked “for a

mob called Sotheby’s”,
adding: “That mob is looking around all the time for anything
that they might be able to
sell.”
Klingender rose to his feet. “If you want to sell this painting
here, I will take this
painting, get a stretcher made for it, photograph it and put it in
a book like this one,” he
said, brandishing a glossy auction catalogue. “Then I’ll take the
painting, put it on a
airplane to New York and put it up on a wall there in an art
gallery, then back in an
airplane to Sydney and to Melbourne.”
As a translator repeated Klingender’s words, Skipper, a veteran
of city exhibitions,
interjected his own elaboration. “So people can see ’em,” he
said to his fellow artists. “So
they can know that thing and get it into their brain, ‘Right, I
want to buy that thing’.”
“After we show it,” Klingender said, “people who’ve seen it
will all come together and
try to buy the painting or call us on the phone and say, ‘I’d like
to give so much’ and
someone else will say ‘I’d like to give more’. It’s a competition
and the winner gets the
painting.”
A painter named Tommy May, who as a stockman had delivered

cattle to livestock
auctions, offered his own analogy. “Just like selling a bull,” he
said.
“Exactly,” Klingender said. “This painting is a number-one
breeder bull.” Klingender
explained that the buyer might be the National Gallery of
Australia or a foreign museum.
“It might be just one person who’ll put it in his house,” he said.
Laughter erupted at the
thought of any one person having a house big enough for such a
painting. “I don’t know
anyone with a house that big,” said Dayman, “but Tim might
know a few.”
Klingender explained that if the artists wanted the painting to
stay in Australia he
could sell it with that stipulation. “But the money would be
less. Either way, if you want
to sell it this year the decision has to be made soon, so it can be
put into the book.”
Skipper stood up and said that he was worried about how much
the painting would
fetch. There were murmurs of assent around the room and
reminiscences about other
sums that had come and gone with little lasting effect. Chuguna
voiced this financial
concern as well. Her tone then shifted and she used the word
ngalkarla - which means a
familiar sound or a rhythm heard from a distance. In this
context, it meant, “spreading
the word”: if the painting was widely seen, it could convey to
outsiders the enduring ties
that exist between the artists and their land.

After further discussion, the artists concluded that they wanted
to get more than
$20,000 for the painting. Klingender smiled. “We’re on safe
ground there,” he whispered
to me. His estimate for Ngurrara I was about $300,000 and,
since Sotheby’s had decided
not to charge its usual commission, the artists would receive
almost the entire sum.
Because auction results are uncertain, especially with a unique
work, Klingender did not
share his estimate with the group. He simply said that he
thought their expectations
would be met.
A brief, desultory discussion continued, mostly in Walmajarri.
People walked around
the painting. Someone spilled a glass of cordial on it. Chuguna
wandered outside and
gazed up at the gathering clouds. “Big rain coming,” she said.
“Got to get back to Bayulu
and look after them kids coming home from school.” Suddenly,
without a vote or any
dramatic declaration, the artists told Dayman they had reached a
decision. The wangki
was that the “little shorty one” was free to go.
here was indeed big rain coming. A cyclone moved close to the
coast that night,
deluging roads and closing airports. After three days of being
immersed in the

world view of the Walmajarri, I wondered briefly if the snake
spirits were angry about
the artists’ decision to sell the painting. Apparently not: the
cyclone didn’t cross the coast.
We made it back to Broome before the Great Northern Highway
became inundated.
T
Two weeks later, Ngurrara I arrived in Melbourne, where
Sotheby’s restorers cleaned
every centimetre of the canvas with water and ethyl alcohol.
“They said they couldn’t
believe what came off it,” Klingender told me. “Buckets of red
mud.” The canvas was
gently ironed flat and then placed on an elaborately engineered
stretcher: a new black
border was added to mask the work’s irregular edges.
Klingender rented the Museum of
Contemporary Art, an art-deco building opposite the Opera
House at Sydney’s Circular
Quay, for a glittering pre-auction showing. The auction itself
took place on July 28 in
Sydney and a West Australian entrepreneur bought the painting
for $213,000.
In Fitzroy Crossing, Ngurrara II awaited a different fate. As
Ngurrara I was readied for
display before the art world’s elite, the big canvas went on
display in the bush. The
Aborigines – the old artists and their young descendants –
decided to take the painting on
a journey back towards the lands that it depicted. Last April,
about 30 Aborigines set off
from Fitzroy Crossing in a convoy of battered trucks and four-

wheel-drives. They made
camp in a sandy bend of river on Cherrabun Station, the vast
cattle property where
Skipper and Chuguna had first encountered white people almost
half a century ago. In
the bright sunlight of a clear morning, the canvas was unfurled
on the ground. Among
the artists who had come on the journey was Spider Snell, who,
at just under 80 years old,
is an elegant and surprisingly vigorous dancer. Snell is the
custodian of an important
ritual dance, the Kurtal ceremony, which is performed while
carrying long, thread-
wrapped boughs that represent the rain clouds controlled by the
snake spirits.
Accompanying him were three young apprentice dancers, boys
who usually attend
boarding school south of Perth, thousands of kilometres away.
For three days, the old
man shared his stories with the young ones – stories of
dreaming, of water, of survival,
and of a past kept alive for them in the thick swirls of paint
beneath their feet.
Class Discussions
You are required to initiate at least two discussions on relevant
and/or current topics that relate to the material we are currently
covering. You can initiate a discussion in the Discussion Room
by identifying a recent article that is accessible online and tying
the topic (in your own words) to the topics that are presently
being covered in the course in that week. Clearly explain how
this article appliesto the material that is being covered. The

amount of credit is based on the degree to which you can
contribute to theother student’sunderstanding of the topics
that are being covered in that week. As you compose and
communicate your thoughts, you will develop a better
understanding of this material. In addition, other students
will benefit from reading your summary. Provide the
specific web site link at the bottom of your discussion.
Just as you can benefit from writing applications like this,
you can benefit from reading the applications provided by
others.Focus on related articles that have occurred recently
such as in the last month. Older articles become obsolete
and do not offer useful information for students. Very technical
articles are not very useful for most topics. There is no benefit
from paraphrasing comments in the article about high-powered
statistics or technical points that cannot be clearly
understood by students. Focus only on practical applications.
Your applications should help other students understand the
material.
Other students (not those who initiated the discussion) are
expected to reflect and comment on at least two discussion
topics brought up by someone else.
Example of Good Discussion. An example of good discussion
is shown below in italics below:
An interesting event occurred in the foreign exchange markets
today, which is closely tied to the material in Chapter 4
assigned this week.
Yesterday, the European central bank raised the interest rate on
the euro. The euro appreciated by 1.3% against the dollar.
According to the Money.com website article link below,
the appreciation of the euro was due to speculators who
converted dollars to euros in order to take advantage of the high
euro interest rate, or who expected that additional money flows
to the euro would push the euro’s value higher.
This example emphasizes past comments made in the text and in
our Discussion Room about how money flows quickly to

wherever interest rates are relatively high, especially when
inflation isnot a major concern in that country or region.
The article suggested that if fears of inflation increased in
Europe, the money may just as quickly flow out of the euro and
back into the U.S., which could cause the euro to
depreciate. This point is relatedto another section in
Chapter 4 regarding the effects of inflationary expectations on
the currency’s value.
SOURCE http://money.cnn....whatever....
Other students may then add to the discussion of a
current topic such as this if they have something to add.
Example of Useless Discussion.Do not post comments that
simply identify a related article on a web site, unless you
offer a summary of the article. The following example is
not useful to students and would not receive any credit:
I found a web site that relates to how exchange rates are
affected.
SOURCE http://money.cnn...whatever...
Also do not post comments that simply confirm a point that
another student already made. Such comments do not add value
and no credit is given for them. If a comment has many typos or
is poorly worded, or has no reference point, it is difficult
for other students to understand. Any form of discussion
that does not help other students understand the material
will not count as credit. I emphasize this because over the last
three semesters that I have taught an online course, a few
students will periodically insert random comments that are
not related to the material.
These comments not only do not contribute, but they
waste the time of other students. For example, when this
course focuses on currency futures, recent articles on
currency futures are applicable, but articles aboutgold futures
or orange juicefutures contractsetc. are not applicable. To paste
a website address that contains the article you are
summarizing, highlight the address for that website on your
computer and then click on “copy” on your computer so that

you can copy the address. Then, as you finish posting your
summary of the article on the course website in the discussion
room, click on “paste” on your computer. Most students know
how to do this, so if the instructions here do not make sense,
ask someone to show you.
Your task:
I want six discussions on relevant and/or current topics that
relate to the material we are currently covering (Ch10,11, and
12). You can initiate a discussion in the Discussion Room by
identifying a recent article that is accessible online and tying
the topic (in your own words) to the topics that are presently
being covered in the course in that week. Clearly explain how
this article applies to the material that is being covered. The
amount of credit is based on the degree to which you can
contribute to the other student’s understanding of the topics that
are being covered in that week. As you compose and
communicate your thoughts, you will develop a better
understanding of this material. In addition, other students will
benefit from reading your summary. Provide the specific web
site link at the bottom of your discussion. Just as you can
benefit from writing applications like this, you can benefit from
reading the applications provided by others. Focus on related
articles that have occurred recently such as in the last month.
Older articles become obsolete and do not offer useful
information for students. Very technical articles are not very
useful for most topics. There is no benefit from paraphrasing
comments in the article about high-powered statistics or

technical points that cannot be clearly understood by students.
Focus only on practical applications. Your applications should
help other students understand the material.
The best place to find topics to initiate or comment on a class
discussion is to refer to current news (Wall Street Journal,
Financial Times etc.).
WHAT
MONEY
CAN"T BUY
The Moral Limits
of Markets
MICHAEL J. SANDEL
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX/ NEW YORK
Introduction: Markets and Morals
T here are some things money can't buy, but these days, not
many.
Today, almost everything is up for sale . Here are a few
examples:
• A prison cell upgrade: $82 per night. In Santa Ana, California,
and some other cities, nonviolent offenders can pay for better

accommodations-a clean, quiet jail cell, away from the cells
for nonpaying prisoners.1
• Access to the car pool lane while driving solo: $8 during rush
hour. Minneapolis and other cities are trying to ease traffic con-
gestion by letting solo drivers pay to drive in car pool lanes, at
rates that vary according to traffic.2
• The services of an Indian surrogate mother to carry a
pregnancy:
$6,250. Western couples seeking surrogates increasingly out-
source the job to India, where the practice is legal and the price
is less than one-third the going rate in the United States. 3
• The right to immigrate to the United States: $500,000.
Foreign-
ers who invest $500,000 and create at least ten jobs in an area
of high unemployment are eligible for a green card that entitles
them to permanent residency.4
1 / WHAT MONEY CAN'T BUY
• The right to shoot an endangered black rhino: $150,000. South

Africa has begun letting ranchers sell hunters the right to kill a
limited number of rhinos, to give the ranchers an incentive to
raise and protect the endangered species. 5
• The cell phone number of your doctor: $1,500and up per year.
A
growing number of"concierge" doctors offer cell phone access
and same-day appointments for patients willing to pay annual
fees ranging from $1,500 to $25,000.6
• The right to emit a metric ton of carbon into the atmosphere:
€13
{about $18). The European Union runs a carbon emissions
market that enables companies to buy and sell the right to
pollute.7
• Admission of your child to a prestigious university: ?
Although
the price is not posted, officials from some top universities told
The Wall Street Journal that they accept some less than stellar
students whose parents are wealthy and likely to make substan-
tial financial contributions. 8

Not everyone can afford to buy these things. But today there are
lots of new ways to make money. If you need to earn some extra
cash,
here are some novel possibilities:
• Rent out space on your forehead (or elsewhere on your body)
to
display commercial advertising: $777. Air New Zealand hired
thirty people to shave their heads and wear temporary tattoos
with the slogan "Need a change? Head down to New Zealand."9
• Serve as a human guinea pig in a drug safety trial for a phar
maceutical company: $7,500. The pay can be higher or lower,
depending on the invasiveness of the procedure used to test the
drug's effect, and the discomfort involved.10
Jntrod 1'clion: !,fo.,·k.els a,id Momls / 5
• Fight in Somalia or Afghanistan for a private military com
pany: $250per month to $1,000 per day. The pay varies accord-
ing to qualifications, experience, and nationality. ll
• Stand in line overnight on Capitol Hill to hold a place for a
lobbyist who wants to attend a congressional hearing: $1 5-$20

per hour. The lobbyists pay line-standing companies, who hire
homeless people and others to queue up.12
• If you are a second grader in an underachieving Dallas school,
read a book: $2. To encourage reading, the schools pay kids for
each book they read.13
• I
f
you are obese, lose fourteen pounds in four months: $378.
Companies and health insurers offer financial incentives for
weight loss and other kinds of healthy behavior.14
• Buy the life insurance policy of an ailing or elderly person,
pay
the annual premiums whil e the person is alive, and then collect
the death benefit when he or she dies: potentially, millions (de-
pending on the policy). This form of betting on the lives of
strangers has become a $30 billion industry. The sooner the
stranger dies, the more the investor makes.15
We live at a time when almost everything can be bought and
sold.
Over the past three decades, markets-and market values-have

come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at
this
condition through any deliberate choice. lt is almost as if it
came
upon us.
As the cold war ended, markets and market thinking ertioyed
unrivaled prestige, understandably so. No other mechanism for
or-
ganizing the production and distribution of goods had proved as
successful at generating affluence and prosperity. And yet, even
as
growing numbers of countries around the world embraced
market
mechanisms in the operation of their economies, something else
was
happening. Market values were coming to play a greater and
greater
role in social life. Economics was becoming an imperial
domain.
Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to
material

goods alone but increasingly governs the whole of life. It is
time to
ask whether we want to live this way.
THE ERA OF MARKET TRIUMPHALISM
The years leading up to the fiuancial crisis of 2008 were a
heady
time of market faith and deregulation-an era of market
triumphal-
ism. The era began in the early 1980s; when Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher proclaimed their conviction that markets, not
government, held the key to prosperity and freedom. And it
contin-
ued in the 1990s, with the market-friendly liberalism of Bill
Clinton
and Tony Blair, who moderated but consolidated the faith that
mar-
kets are the primary means for achieving the public good.
Today, that faith is in doubt. The era of market triumphalism
has
come to an end. The financial crisis did more than cast doubt on
the
ability of markets to allocate risk efficiently. It also prompted a
wide-
spread sense that markets have become detached from morals
and
that we need somehow to reconnect them. But it's not obvious

what
this would mean, or how we should go about it.
Some say the moral failing at the heart of market triumphalism
was greed, which led to irresponsible risk taking. The solution,
according to this view, is to rein in greed, insist on greater
integrity
and responsibility among bankers and Wall Street executives,
and
enact sensible regulations to prevent a similar crisis from
happening
again.
folroduction: Mark,l, and Mora.I, / 7
This is, at best, a partial diagnosis. While it is certainly true
that
greed played a role in the financial crisis, something bigger is at
stake. The most fateful change that unfolded during the past
three
decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of
mar-
kets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don't
belong.
To contend with this condition, we need to do more than inveigh
against greed; we need to rethink the role that markets should
play
in our society. We need a public debate about what it means to
keep
markets in their place. To have this debate, we need to think

through
the moral limits of markets. We need to ask whether there are
some
things money should not buy.
The reach of markets, and market-oriented thinking, into
aspects
of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms is one of the
most
significant developments of our time.
Consider the proliferation of for-profit schools, hospitals, and
prisons, and the outsourcing of war to private military
contractors.
(In Iraq and Afghanistan, private contractors actually
outnumbered
U.S. military troops. 16)
Consider the eclipse of public police forces by private security
firms-especially in the United States and Britain, where the
num-
ber of private guards is more than twice the number of public
police
officers. 17
Or consider the pharmaceutical companies' aggressive
marketing
of prescription drugs to consumers in rich countries. (lf you've
ever
seen the television commercials on the evening news in the
United
States, you could be forgiven for thinking that the greatest

health
crisis in the world is not malaria or river blindness or sleeping
sick-
ness, but a rampant epidemic of erectile dysfunction.)
Consider too the reach of commercial advertising into public
schools; the sale of "naming rights" to parks and civic spaces;
the
marketing of"designer" eggs and sperm for assisted
reproduction;
the outsourcing of pregnancy to surrogate mothers in the
developing
world; the buying and selling, by companies and countries, of
the
right to pollute; a system of campaign finance that comes close
to
permitting the buying and selling of elections.
These uses of markets to allocate health, education, public
safety,
national security, criminal justice, environmental protection,
recre-
ation, procreation, and other social goods were for the most part
unheard of thirty years ago. Today, we take them largely for
granted.
EVERYTHING FOR SALE
Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which
everything

is up for sale?
For two reasons: one is about inequality; the other is about cor-
ruption. Consider inequality. In a society where everything is
for
sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The more money
can
buy, the more affluence (or the Jack of it) matters.
If the only advantage of affluence were the ability to buy
yachts,
sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities of income and
wealth
would not matter very much. But as money comes to buy more
and
more-political influence; good medical care, a home in a safe
neigh-
borhood rather than a crime-ridden one, access to elite schools
rather
than failing ones-the distribution of income and wealth looms
larger
and larger. Where all good things are bought and sold, having
money
makes all the difference in the world.
This explains why the last few decades have been especially
hard
on poor and middle-class families. Not only has the gap
between
!
'I
,'
Introduction: Markets and Morals / 9

rich and poor widened, the commodification of everything has
sharpened the sting of inequality by making money matter more.
The second reason we should hesitate to put everything up for
sale is more difficult to describe. It is not about inequality and
fair-
ness but about the corrosive tendency of markets. Putting a
price on
the good things in life can corrupt them. That's because markets
don't only allocate goods; they also express and promote certain
at-
titudes toward the goods being exchanged. Paying kids to read
books might get them to read more, but also teach them to
regard
reading as a chore rather than a source of intrinsic satisfaction.
Auc-
tioning seats in the freshman class to the highest bidders might
raise
revenue but also erode the integrity of the college and the value
of its
diploma. Hiring foreign mercenaries to fight our wars might
spare
the lives of our citizens but corrupt the meaning of citizenship.
Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not
affect the goods they exchange. But this is untrue. Markets
leave
their mark. Sometimes, market values crowd out nonmarket
values
worth caring about.
Of course, people disagree about what values are worth caring
about, and why. So to decide what money should-and should
not-

be able to buy, we have to decide what values should govern the
various domains of social and civic life. How to think this
through is
the subject of this book.
Here is a preview of the answer I hope to offer: when we decide
that certain goods may be bought and sold, we decide, at least
im-
plicitly, that it is appropriate to treat them as· commodities, as
instru-
ments of profit and use. But not all goods are properly valued in
this
way.18 The most obvious example is human beings. Slavery was
ap-
palling because it treated human beings as commodities, to be
bought
and sold at auction. Such treatment fails to value human beings
in
the appropriate way-as persons worthy of dignity and respect,
rather than as instruments of gain and objects of use.
Something similar can be said of other cherished goods and
practices. We don't allow children to be bought and sold on the
mar-
ket. Even if buyers did not mistreat the children they purchased,
a
market in children would express and promote the wrong way of

valuing them. Children are not properly regarded as consumer
goods but aS·beings worthy of love and care. Or consider the
rights
and obligations of citizenship. If you are called to jury duty,
you may
not hire a substitute to take your place. Nor do we allow
citizens to
sell their votes, even though others might be eager to buy them.
Why
not? Because we believe that civic duties should not be
regarded as
private property but should be viewed instead as public
responsi-
bilities. To outsource them is to demean them, to value them in
the
wrong way.
These examples illustrate a broader point: some of the good
things in life are corrupted or degraded if turned into
commodities.
So to decide where the market belongs, and where it should be
kept
at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in
question-

health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties, and so
on.
These are moral and political questions, not merely economic
ones.
To resolve them, we have to debate, case by case, the moral
meaning
of these goods and the proper way of valuing them.
This is a debate we didn't have during the era of market trium-
phalism. As a result, without quite realizing it, without ever
deciding
to do so, we drifted from having a market economy to being a
market
society.
The difference is this: A market economy is a tool-a valuable
and effective tool-for organizing productive activity. A rnarket
soci-
ety is a way of life in which market values seep into every
aspect of
fotrod,ulion: Markets and Morals / 11
human endeavor. It's a place where social relations are made
over in
the image of the market.

The great missing debate in contemporary politics is about the
role and reach of markets. Do we want a market economy, or a
mar-
ket society? What role should markets play in public life and
per-
sonal relations? How can we decide which goods should be
bought
and sold, and which should be governed by nonmarket values?
Where should money's writ not run?
These are the questions this book seeks to address. Since they
touch on contested visions of the good society and the good life,
1 can't promise definitive answers. But I hope at least to prompt
pub-
lic discussion of these questions, and to provide a philosophical
framework for thinking them through.
RETHINKlNC THE ROLE OF MARKETS
Even if you agree that we need to grapple with big questions
about
the morality of markets, you might doubt that our public
discourse
is up to the task. It's a legitimate worry. Any attempt to rethink

the
role and reach of markets should begin by acknowledging two
daunt-
ing obstacles.
One is the persisting power and prestige of market thinking,
even
in the aftermath of the worst market failure in eighty years. The
other
is the rancor and emptiness of our public discourse. These two
con-
ditions are not entirely unrelated.
The first obstacle is puzzling. At the time, the financial crisis of
2008 was widely seen as a moral verdict on the uncritical
embrace of
markets that had prevailed, across the political spectrum, for
three
decades. The near collapse of once-mighty Wall Street financial
firms,
and the need for a massive bailout at taxpayers' expense,
seemed

sure to prompt a reconsideration of markets. Even Alan
Greenspan,
who as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve had served as high
priest of the market triumphalist faith, admitted to "a state of
shocked
disbelieP' that his confidence in the self-correcting power of
free
markets turned out to be mistaken.19 The cover of The
Economist,
the buoyantly pro-market British magazine, showed an
economics text-
book melting into a puddle, under the headline WHAT WENT
WRONG
WITH ECONOMICS.2U
The era of market triumphalism had come to a devastating end.
Now, surely, would be a time of moral reckoning, a season of
sober
second thoughts about the market faith. But things haven't
turned
out that way.
The spectacular failure of financial markets did little to dampen
the faith in markets generally. In fact, the financial crisis
discredited

government more than the banks. In 2011, surveys found that
the
American public blamed the federal government more than Wall
Street financial institutions for the economic problems facing
the
country-by a margin of more than two to one. 21
The financial crisis had pitched the United States and much of
the global economy into the worst economic downturn since the
Great Depression and left millions of people out of work. Yet it
did
not prompt a fundamental rethinking of markets. Instead, its
most
notable political consequence in the United States was the rise
of the
Tea Party movement, whose hostility to government and
embrace of
free markets would have made Ronald Reagan blush. In the fall
of
2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement brought protests to
cities
throughout the United States and around the world. These
protests

targeted big banks and corporate power, and the rising
inequality of
income and wealth. Despite their different ideological
orientations,
,•
Introduction: Markets and Morals / 13
both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street activists gave voice
to
populist outrage against the bailout. 22
Notwithstanding these voices of protest, serious debate about
the
role and reach of markets remains largely absent from our
political
life. Democrats and Republicans argue, as they long have done,
about taxes, spending, and budget deficits, only now with
greater
partisanship and little ability to inspire or persuade. Disillusion
with
politics has deepened as citizens grow frustrated with a political
system u na hie to act for the public good, or to address the
questions
that matter most.

This parlous state of public discourse is the second obstacle to a
debate about the moral limits of markets. At a time when
political
argument consists mainly of shouting matches on cable
television,
partisan vitriol on talk radio, and ideological food fights on the
floor
of Congress, it's hard to imagine a reasoned public debate about
such controversial moral questions as the right way to value
procre-
ation, children, education, health, the environment, citizenship,
and
other goods. But I believe such a debate is possible, and that it
would
invigorate our public life.
Some see in our rancorous politics a surfeit of moral conviction:
too many people believe too deeply, too stridently, in their own
con-
victions and want to impose them on everyone else. I think this
misreads our predicament. The problem with our politics is not
too
much moral argument but too little. Our politics is overheated
be-

cause it is mostly vacant, empty of moral and spiritual content.
It
fails to engage with big questions that people care about.
The moral vacancy of contemporary politics has a number of
sources. One is the attempt to banish notions of the good life
from
public discourse. In hopes of avoiding sectarian strife, we often
in-
sist that citizens leave their moral and spiritual convictions
behind
when they enter the public square. But despite its good
intention,
the reluctance to admit arguments about the good life into
politics
prepared the way for market triumphalism and for the
continuing
hold of market reasoning.
In its own way, market reasoning also empties public life of
moral
argument. Part of the appeal of markets is that they don't pass
judg-
ment on the preferences they satisfy. They don't ask whether
some
ways of valuing goods are higher, or worthier, than others. If

some-
one is willing to pay for sex or a kidney, and a consenting adult
is
willing to sell, the only question the economist asks is, "How
much?"
Markets don't wag fingers. They don't discriminate between
admi-
rable preferences and base ones. Each party to a deal decides
for
himself or herself what value to place on the things being
exchanged.
This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of
mar-
ket reasoning and explains much of its appeal. But our
reluctance to
engage in moral and spiritual argument, together with our
embrace
of markets, has exacted a heavy price: it has drained public dis-
course of moral and civic energy, and contributed to the techno-
cratic, managerial politics that afflicts many societies today.
A debate about the moral limits of markets would enable us to
decide, as a society, where markets serve the public good and
where
they don't belong. It would also invigorate our politics, by
welcom-
ing competing notions of the good life into the public square.
For
how else could such arguments proceed? If you agree that
buying
and selling certain goods corrupts or degrades them, then you
must
believe that some ways of valuing these goods are more
appropriate
than others. It hardly makes sense to speak of corrupting an

activity-
parenthood, say, or citizenship-unless you think that some ways
of
being a parent, or a citizen, are better than others.
Moral judgments such as these lie behind the few limitations
lntrodu,ction: Marlttts and Morals / 15
on markets we still observe. We don't allow parents to sell their
children or citizens to sell their votes. And one of the reasons
we
don't is, frankly,judgmental: we believe that selling these things
val-
ues them in the wrong way and cultivates bad attitudes.
Thinking through the moral limits of markets makes these ques-
tions unavoidable. It requires that we reason together, in public,
about how to value the social goods we prize. It would be folly
to
expect that a morally more robust public discourse, even at its
best,
would lead to agreement on every contested question. But it
would
make for a healthier public life. And it would make,us more
aware of
the price we pay for living in a society where everything is up
for
sale.
W hen we think of the morality of markets, we think first of
Wall
Street banks and their reckless misdeeds, of hedge funds and
bail-
outs and regulatory reform. But the moral and political
challenge we

face today is more pervasive and more mundane-to rethink the
role
and reach of markets in our social practices, human
relationships,
and everyday lives.

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The Painted Desert: Aboriginal Art from Australia's Outback