Symbolic meanings of prices: Constructing the value of contemporary art in Amsterdam and New York galleries

This article develops a sociological analysis of the price mechanism on the market for contemporary art. On the basis of in-depth interviews with art dealers in New York and Amsterdam, I address two pricing norms: one norm inhibits art dealers from decreasing prices; the other induces them to set prices according to size. To account for these pricing norms, I argue that price setting is not just an economic but also a signifying act: despite their impersonal, businesslike connotations, actors on markets manage to express a range of cognitive and cultural meanings through prices. Previously, meanings of prices have been recognized in signaling theories within economics. However, these meanings are restricted to profit opportunities. Within the humanities, by contrast, meanings of prices are restricted to contaminating or corrosive meanings. The sociological perspective I develop claims that prices, price differences, and price changes convey multiple meanings related to the reputation of artists, the social status of dealers, and the quality of the artworks that are traded.     

THE END OF THE ART CONNOISSEUR? EXPERTS AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN THE VISUAL ARTS IN THE DIGITAL AGE

In this digital age, declarations surface of the death of the expert and the democratization of information. Crowd wisdom is seen as the new guide in constructing and evaluating knowledge. In the context of the art world, this tension between the amateurs and the experts becomes particularly pronounced as popular meets high culture. Questions arise such as: what is the role of the expert in the evaluation of art in contemporary times? Do social media dismantle age-old hierarchies and established priesthoods in the art world? And can we assume that mass participation in valuation results in better judgments? This article addresses such popular notions of participation and expertise concerning social media in the art world through a historical lens by re-examining and positioning art experts from past to present. Particularly, characteristics of intermediaries in the art market are examined closely regarding their strategies in knowledge production and the establishment of expertise. This historical situatedness enables us to move beyond the hype of new media expectations, generating more appropriate avenues of investigation to better grasp possible changes amongst actors within the contemporary art world. This examination is not just theoretically relevant but practically so, given current pressures on art institutions to embrace and reach out to new audiences online.     

REPUTATION,PRICE, AND DEATH: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF ART PRICE FORMATION

We analyze how an artist's death influences the market prices of her works of art. Death has two opposing effects on art prices. By irrevocably restricting the artist's oeuvre, prices, ceteris paribus, increase when the artist dies. On the other hand, an untimely death may well frustrate the collectors' hopes of owning artwork that will, as the artist's career progresses, become generally known and appreciated. By frustrating expected future name recognition, death impacts negatively on art prices. In conjunction, these two channels of influence give rise to a hump‐shaped relationship between age at death and death‐induced price changes. Using transactions from fine art auctions, we show that the empirically identified death effects indeed conform to our theoretical predictions. We derive our results from hedonic art price regressions, making use of a dataset which exceeds the sample size of traditional studies in cultural economics by an order of magnitude. (JEL Z11, J24, G12)     

Aesthetics of disaster as decolonial aesthetics: making sense of the effects of Hurricane María through Puerto Rican contemporary art

ABSTRACT

On 20 September 2017, Hurricane María made landfall on Puerto Rico causing unprecedented disaster. From that day onwards, the Puerto Rican multi-layered colonial, social and political context was further complicated by the traumatic acceleration of a human disaster via this natural disaster. This crystalized the urgency of using art as vehicle for (social) catharsis, a practice that continues to be used by individual artists, collectives, community organizations, art projects, and other art institutions on the island and abroad, through mural art, community paintings, art exhibitions, literature, music, and many other aesthetic expressions. This article examines, from a decolonial and critical cultural studies perspective, post-Hurricane María artistic expressions in contemporary art as decolonial aesthetics through the cathartic use of the frame of an aesthetics of disaster. It is argued that, an aesthetics of disaster aims to re-assert an artistic form that is able to accelerate the discursive nullification of a deeply rooted colonial, social and cultural problem by way of art as catharsis inspired by the way that Hurricane María unveiled these problems. The piece briefly contextualizes Puerto Rico, and it examines the idea of Puerto Rican contemporary art as catharsis. Then, it describes how Puerto Rican contemporary art exhibitions and associated aesthetic production are processing urgent post-hurricane issues through three illustrative pieces in exhibitions in PR and abroad in the United States (US). Lastly, decolonial aesthetics is reexamined and re-understood, informed by Édouard Glissant's view expressed in Poetics of Relation which aids to the conclusion that Puerto Rican contemporary art using the frame of an aesthetics of disaster functions as a powerful form of decolonial aesthetics.     

Ups and downs of art commerce: narratives of “crisis” in the contemporary art markets of Russia and India

This article develops an analytical framework to study the role of narratives in markets and argues that there is a relationship between the structure and composition of narratives produced by market actors and market dynamics. With respect to theory, the article bridges the perspectives that study markets as cultures and as fields and draws from the organizational studies approach to the analysis of narratives. Two empirical cases of the crises narratives in the emerging contemporary art markets of Russia and India illustrate the use of the framework. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with artists and art dealers as well as observations in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, New Delhi, and Mumbai conducted between April 2012 and June 2013. The article shows that there is a widely shared crisis narrative with a coherent structure in the Indian art market. In contrast, fragmented and contested stories that lack narrative structure dominate in the Russian art market. The analysis of the first case highlights the narrative structure and shows the productive work it does in the Indian market—it provides a moral justification of existing market norms and produces a perspective for the future. The analysis of the second case focuses on the context of narrative production and connects the conflicting interpretations of the crisis in the Russian art market to contested hierarchies and persistent uncertainty.     

Tomorrow,things will be different Qiu Zhijie’s concept of keeping alive life through art

Abstract

The paper examines Qiu Zhijie’s multi-layered project A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge (since 2008) and asks what is at stake when art literally and metaphorically is assigned with life-saving functions. Based on the artist’s assumption that today’s social and political reality as well as its subjects are historically constructed the article conceives of the Nanjing Bridge as an embodiment of a historically constituted contemporary Chinese reality. Through close readings of the works as well as analyses of theoretical writings by Qiu Zhijie the article scrutinises the relationship Total Art assumes between the social and the aesthetic realm and examines the premises and strategies the artist adopts in order to produce socially and aesthetically effective art that keeps ‘alive’.     

FROM PRINTS TO POSTERS: THE PRODUCTION OF ARTISTIC VALUE IN A POPULAR ART WORLD

The activity of a gallery in an art world is centered not only on the distribution of works, but also on the development of a clientele. This involves convincing potential customers that works have both artistic and economic value. The traditional path of valuation of works is through the gatekeepers of the high art world. There are, however, art worlds whose works have not passed through these high art gatekeepers, but which are nevertheless successful in maintaining a clientele. This article examines the process by which this popular art world establishes a positive value for its art when it has no access to the legitimating institutions of the high art world. Data were gathered primarily through interviews with gallery directors, employees, and artists, both from the popular and high-art worlds. The sample includes 18 popular galleries and 10 high art galleries in the Chicago area. “Popular galleries” are defined as those galleries located in the shopping districts of cities or in suburban shopping malls. Many are part of larger chains, and all carry prints by well-known artists, works of lesser known artists, and some posters.     

The governmentalities of neoliberalism: panopticism,post‐panopticism and beyond

This paper draws on the writings of Michel Foucault, in particular his lectures on biopolitics at the Collège de France from 1978–79, to examine liberalism and neoliberalism as governmental forms that operate through different models of surveillance. First, this paper re‐reads Foucault's Discipline and Punish in the light of his analysis of the art of liberal government that is advanced through the course of these lectures. It is argued that the Panopticon is not just an architecture of power centred on discipline and normalization, as is commonly understood, but a normative model of the relation of the state to the market which, for Foucault, is ‘the very formula of liberal government’. Second, the limits of panopticism, and by extension liberal governance, are explored through analysis of Gilles Deleuze's account of the shift from disciplinary to ‘control’ societies, and Zygmunt Bauman's writings on individualization and the ‘Synopticon’. In response to Deleuze and Bauman, the final section of this paper returns to Foucault's lectures on biopolitics to argue that contemporary capitalist society is characterized not simply by the decline of state powers (the control society) or the passing down of responsibilities from the state to the individual (the individualization thesis), but by the neoliberal marketization of the state and its institutions; a development which is underpinned by a specific form of governmentality. In conclusion, a four‐fold typology of surveillance is advanced: surveillance as discipline, as control, as interactivity, and as a mechanism for promoting competition. It is argued that while these types of surveillance are not mutually exclusive, they are underpinned by different governmentalities that can be used to address different aspects of the relationship between the state and the market, and with this the social and cultural logics of contemporary forms of market capitalism more broadly.     

Maintenance work: Interrogating the sociology of art

The following article explores the different ways art sociologists investigate art that is based in the participatory arts. The aim is to shift the empirical focus to the art practice, which speaks for itself, and to place the work of the artist and all who cooperate or collaborate in the making of the artwork at the center of sociological analysis. By allowing the artist to speak fully about their work, art sociologists can uncover new social and cultural phenomena and better understand the different motivations underlying art-making. The following literature highlights the recent tendencies in the sociology of art, explores the “social turn” in art and presents different sociologists who focus on the art practice and the art’s voice. For further development of the field, I suggest the sociology of art needs to catch-up with the recent tendencies in art by placing the empirical focus on participatory art practices that will not only give us a better understanding about the intricate actions taking place in the art making, but it will also illuminate new layers of social life that are hidden. To conclude, I suggest that sociologists engage with participatory-based artists to enhance sociology through a public sociology of art.     

Photography,cinema and medium as social practice

One of the more interesting aspects of the dialogue between the mediums of the still and moving image that has taken place over recent years has been a concern within fine-art photography for the cinematic. Photographers have turned to the style and iconography of the established genres of cinema as a means of reinventing the pictorial form of the tableau and thereby to explore the possibilities of narrativity within the static image. However, beyond any aesthetic interest the contemporary genre of the ‘cinematic photograph’ may hold, it is argued here that it may be indicative of an important shift in the social, economic and technological bases of fine-art photography. This essay suggests that the significance of the ‘cinematic photograph’ lies in its complex forms of technical production, the mobilisation of skilled labour and professional expertise, and the deployment of substantial economic resources, which are to be found in the film industry. Through an analysis of the work of the American photographer Gregory Crewdson, the authors demonstrate how the formal and iconographic properties of his images are inseparable from his adoption of the cinema's specific modes of production and that the latter is central to a reading of Crewdson's photographs. The consequences this holds for our understanding of the medium of photography are developed with reference to Raymond Williams's concept of ‘medium as social practice’. The authors conclude that the ‘cinematic photograph’ might be regarded as symptomatic of a trend within contemporary art practices to model themselves on cinema as the emblematic form of cultural production of ‘late capitalism’, a trend that has significant implications for the dominant conceptions concerning the nature of the work of art and the role of the artist.     

Stock Market and Aggregate Investment Behavior in Malaysia: An Empirical Analysis

The present paper analyzes the role of stock market, more specifically real stock prices and stock market uncertainty/volatility, on aggregate investment behavior for an emerging market, Malaysia. Employing the autoregressive distributed lags approach to cointegration test, the paper establishes a long run equilibrium that ties the aggregate investment to its determinants—real income, real stock prices, real lending rate and stock market volatility. In the long run, we document a positive relation between aggregate investment and real stock prices and a negative relation between aggregate investment and stock market volatility. These results are further supported by our analyses of their dynamic interactions based on Granger causality and impulse-response functions. Based on the results, the real stock market prices, which has yet reached the level recorded prior to the crisis, may have explained the low investment in Malaysia after the Asian crisis. Moreover, the stock market volatility can also post a threat to the investment performance.     

Beyond the Static Image: Tee Corinne's Roles as a Pioneering Lesbian Artist and Art Historian

While Tee Corinne has been widely recognized as a preeminent lesbian and feminist artist of the last forty years, little has been written about her as an artist or art historian in any substantial way. This article attempts to shed light on Corinne's investment in creating explicitly sexual lesbian visual art and art historical writings that put pressure on the categories of artist and art historian between the 1970s and early 2000s. Corinne's work manages to fulfill feminist ideals while also working outside of the norms set up in both the lesbian and mainstream realms of art and art history.     

Banishing the past: The German avant-garde and Nazi art

How do radical changes in cultural policy affect artistic reputations? Nazi policy to control memory—through the stigmatization of artists and the confiscation of their art—was less than fully successful for two main reasons: (1) Refugees and the German need for foreign exchange carried many pieces into the international market, where they escaped destruction from bombing raids; and (2) in post-war Germany a considerable effort was made not only to connect with a “broken” tradition but also to locate victims and to salvage as much of their work and reputations as possible. Allied efforts to banish Nazi-approved art from the collective memory have been far more successful. Many works that survive still rest in repositories not open to the public and, while work by a few Nazi favorites are still in demand, public commemoration remains politically controversial. Whether the reputation of an artist survives such sharp breaks in the political culture depends not only on the physical preservation of prior work but also on decisions as to who merits a place in the archives accessible to posterity.     

The Standpoint of Art/Criticism: Cindy Sherman as Feminist Artist?*

Feminist Standpoint Theory identifies knowledge as a social product developed from a specific social position. We apply this theory to explore the dominant standpoint informing the social organization of Western art via an institution we call art/criticism. We find that the assumptions, values, and analytic strategies informing mainstream art and art criticism express the standpoint of privileged men. As a test of our argument, we consider the case of an artist who is often hailed as a feminist artist and yet is one of the most successful woman artists today: Cindy Sherman. We find that while Sherman is working with some fertile possibilities for feminist analysis, her work ends up re‐directing this potential into a disempowering play with images. We conclude that rather than countering our argument, the celebration of Sherman’s work as feminist reveals the workings, as well as the limits, of the privileged male standpoint in art.     

Shifting visibilities: the social implications of a Roma aesthetic

ABSTRACT

This paper is a personal reflection by a Roma artist upon the mutual influence of Roma social relations and Roma visual culture. Strategies of art making are considered via analyses of contemporary Roma art works. It is suggested that historic marginalisation and continuing discrimination have determined the contingent nature of the Roma aesthetic resulting in keen facilities for adaptation and obscured visibility. Roma artefacts are shown to employ these resistant characteristics of Roma visuality to convey social, cultural, artistic and political agency via visual and performative means. The conclusion calls for a reconceptualisation of Roma visibilities so that we as Roma might forge new political unities and new forms of politics to more effectively challenge embedded Romaphobia.     

Baptism of Blood: Bodies Performing for the Law

This article undertakes an analysis of Ron Athey’s and Hermann Nitsch’s performance art and blood rituals to show how their radical artistic spectacles are necessary acts of defiance in contemporary art and society. They open up the possibilities for subjects to redefine their relationship to the big Other. The author argues that the use of blood is at the centre of both of these artists’ performances and has the potency to unsettle and attack the patriarchal system of social authorities. At the same time, the popularization of such artistic and bloody practices has led to the appropriation of blood in mainstream popular culture. By referring to popular artist Lady Gaga and her use of blood in recent performances, the article demonstrates that blood is divested of its symbolisms and becomes a mere commodified product. The comparison between performance artists and popular artists like Lady Gaga reveals how blood is used in different ways to facilitate each artist’s project. While Athey’s performances stress blood as the site of the reality of the body in pain, and Nitsch’s as a celebration of both Eros and Thanatos, Lady Gaga’s performances by using fake blood separate blood from the body and meaning.     

Art Markets,Sociology and the Emotional Art Object

In its current state the sociology of art markets is characterized by an externalist approach to the analysis of art value in which the art object is the repository of beliefs, judgements given to it by art market actors. However, a review of the literature on art museums poses a challenge to this externalist approach by focusing on the mutually constitutive relationship between the art object, its exhibition and museum context, and viewers. The article reviews this literature exploring the advantages of this line of research for a meaningful sociology of art markets. It will argue for the need to overcome its current externalist focus with studies of the emotional dimension of art market objects as well as of the practices of art market actors.     

From Maidens to Mugs: The Motif of the Mirror in the Works of Nikolai Gogol'

From Plato’s times to our contemporary age, theorists have spoken of art as being a mirror of life and sometimes argued against the notion. In his nonfiction essays on art and literature, Gogol' was also fond of the metaphor. Due to the frequency with which mirrors appear in his work, Gogol'’s oeuvre offers a unique opportunity for study of how the idiom of art-as-mirror transforms in the move from theoretical reflections to his fictional stories. Appealing to Meyer Abrams’s claim that the mirror has become a “constitutive” metaphor, this article assumes that: a) the potential problems the metaphor introduces are fair game in general theorizing, and b) the questions introduced into the texts by Gogol'’s fictional mirrors may also point toward problematic issues in his thought on art and development as an artist. The article surveys Gogol'’s use of mirrors in his fiction and relates them to their theoretical counterparts. Clear patterns emerge that parallel the geographical and meta-literary subject matter of his work. Ultimately, the article reveals how Gogol'’s evolving treatment of the mirror metaphor may offer insight into the sources of the author’s “creative decline.”     

Artist-run galleries—A contemporary institutional change in the visual arts

This paper focuses on the contemporary phenomenon of artists who, because of institutional changes in the social organization of the visual arts, become their own gatekeepers by running their own galleries, managing their own exposure and re-establishing direct contact with their audiences and communities. The author contends that the ways in which artists have pursued and organized their own galleries shed light on both the functioning of the established social organization of art and the circumstances that bring about its change. The paper explores the organization, operations and viability of visual artist-managed galleries in the San Francisco and Santa Cruz areas of California as an alternative to the established organization of the art market. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Pacific Sociological Association Meetings in Sacramento, California (April, 1977). This study was made possible by a grant from the Research Committee of the University of California, Santa Cruz. My warmest thanks to Judith Balfe and Gerald Platt for their substantive and editorial assistance and to Jenny Debouzek for her assistance throughout this research.