Salt cellar 18th-19th century

This diminutive, colorless glass salt cellar poses a deceptively simple question about the relationship between ordinary things and social class. Before the industrial revolution, glass was a luxury and salt was an expensive commodity. Small precious objects like this were kept on the table to mark the status of the host and season food communally. We can think about the history of glassmaking and the social rituals of dining to understand how objects like this acquire meaning. The absence of a known artist's name also hints at the way the social status of craftspeople has often been suppressed in the history of art institutions like this one. By researching things like historical price indexes, and books on the history of dining we can learn to interpret objects like this in terms of wider social and economic structures. The meaning of art objects is always contingent on social and institutional context.