Figurative painting has a long and intimate relationship to the market. The genre is primed for commodification in societies built around ownership and property, and its circulation on the market has serious political implications. Expanding on her extensive scholarship taking up questions of value in art, founder and publisher of “Texte zur Kunst” Isabelle Graw spoke with Kerry James Marshall to consider these implications and think through related questions. Marshall is perhaps best known for his joyful compositions of everyday Black life in the tradition of history painting, but his oeuvre is also rich with works that are self-aware of their status as commodities. The figures in these works are numbers or language, yet, as Marshall says, he doesn’t differentiate them from his traditionally figurative paintings. They’re all the product of the same consciousness: his.