Larissa Buchholz | Northwestern University (original) (raw)

Selected Publications by Larissa Buchholz

Nonsite. Peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities, 2024

This article contributes to an interdisciplinary journal issue in which four art historians respo... more This article contributes to an interdisciplinary journal issue in which four art historians responded to "The Global Rules of Art." I begin by considering the epistemological foundations of multidisciplinary exchange, drawing a comparison with the field of world literature studies and Franco Moretti's notion of “distant reading.” I then clarify what I mean by “global field,” describing how the term allows us to see the “globality” of contemporary art in new ways and to distinguish different global art circuits. Ultimately, I argue that a sociological perspective can offer a particular way of "distant seeing" global contemporary art that complements, rather than contradicts, art historical accounts' traditional preference for micro-level narratives related to material objects, artistic creation processes or artist case studies.

Global and Transnational Sociology Newsletter of the American Sociological Association, 2023

"In light of the recent publication of Larissa Buchholz’s book, The Global Rules of Art: The Emer... more "In light of the recent publication of Larissa Buchholz’s book, The Global Rules of Art: The Emergence and Divisions of a Cultural WorldEconomy (Princeton University Press), which expands and revises Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory at a global scale, Andreas Wimmer speaks with Larissa Buchholz about the advantages and developments of a rising paradigm in global/transnational studies."

Chapter 1, Preview: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691245447/the-global-rules-of-art#preview, 2022

Book Abstract: Prior to the 1980s, the art world used to be a highly Western-centric game. The ca... more Book Abstract: Prior to the 1980s, the art world used to be a highly Western-centric game. The canon of “international” contemporary art was made up almost exclusively of artists from North America and Western Europe, while cultural agents from other parts of the world often found themselves on the margins. The Global Rules of Art examines to what extent this discriminatory situation has changed in recent decades. Drawing from abundant sources—including on the arts infrastructures of over a hundred countries, multiple institutional histories and discourses, extensive fieldwork, and interviews with artists, critics, curators, gallerists, auction house agents, and collectors—Larissa Buchholz examines the emergence of a world-spanning art field whose logics have increasingly become defined in global terms.

Deftly blending comprehensive historical analyses with illuminating case studies, The Global Rules of Art breaks new ground in its exploration of valuations and how cultural hierarchies and canons take shape in a global context. The book’s innovative global field approach will appeal to scholars in cultural sociology, interdisciplinary global studies, cultural market studies, art historians and cultural theorists, and anyone interested in the dynamics of global art and culture.

Judgement Practices in the Artistic Field, 2022

American Journal of Sociology, 2022

American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2020

We examine how the contemporary art market has changed as a result of the disruptions caused by t... more We examine how the contemporary art market has changed as a result of the disruptions caused by the novel coronavirus. Based on interviews with artists, collectors, a dealer, and an auction house executive, we argue that the decline of face-to-face interaction, previously essential to art market transactions, has placed strain on each corner of the community. In the absence of physical co-presence with the artworks and art world actors, participants struggle to evaluate and appreciate artworks, make new social ties, develop trust, and experience a shared sense of pleasure and collective effervescence. These challenges especially impact the primary gallery market , where participants emphasize a communal commitment to art above instrumental speculation, which is more accepted in the secondary auction market. We find a transition to distant online communication, but the likelihood of this continuing after the lockdowns end and the virus dissipates varies according to the subcultures of these market segments.

British Journal of Sociology, 2018

Reader beware. Despite the book's title, don't be trapped in prejudice by associating 'Creativity... more Reader beware. Despite the book's title, don't be trapped in prejudice by associating 'Creativity Class' too closely with Richard Florida's long-contested and meanwhile selfdefeated 'Creative Class' thesis. This book is different in theoretical ambition, empirical depth and critical approach. Within a global economy in which innovation seems imperative to keep abreast, creativity discourses have caught up with Chinese state officials and informed their active fostering of cultural industries. Against this background, Chumley critically engages a striking puzzle: how a society that has long suppressed individual creative impulses in favour of Maoist collectivism and struggled with the stigma of being a land of quintessentially uncreative people seeks to bolster its creative 'human capital' (rencai).

Kulturen im Globalen Dialog. 2019. Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft. ISBN: 978-3000591037, 2019

Poetics, 2018

A central question in the culture and globalization debate has been how global transformations af... more A central question in the culture and globalization debate has been how global transformations affect center-periphery hierarchies among countries in realms of cultural production. However, hitherto scholarship has tended to approach the center-periphery distinction in unitary terms. This article extends Bourdieu’s model of a dual economy in fields to develop a framework of different types and dimensions of country hierarchies. Taking the contemporary visual arts as a case, it demonstrates that linking the dual economy model with the conceptualization of center-periphery hierarchies offers a more fine-grained lens to examine some of their dynamics. Comparing the evolution of hierarchies among countries in the global auction market and global art exhibition space, the article reveals how center-periphery configurations at the relatively autonomous and heteronomous pole of an emerging global field follow systematically different patterns and temporalities: whereas the auction market exhibits rapid changes—particularly with the rise of China—, culturally based asymmetries in the global exhibition space are marked by slower transformations along generational cycles of longue durée. Although the findings are unique to contemporary art, they indicate that extending Bourdieu’s theory may offer tools to go beyond monolithic center-periphery models. It allows to account for the multidimensionality of macrolevel hierarchies as well as their varying logics of change.

The Sociological Review , 2016

While scholarship on global and transnational fields has been emerging, hitherto contributions h... more While scholarship on global and transnational fields has been emerging,
hitherto contributions have rarely or not explicitly discussed how Bourdieu’s field
theory has to be altered when its use expands from a national to a global scale. Starting
from the premise that a global field is not a national field writ large, this paper discusses
strategies and elements for revising field theory for use beyond national borders.
Specifically, the article first proposes analogical theorizing as a systematic approach for
extending and modifying the tools of field theory at a global level. Analogical theorizing
offers amethod for constructing the object in a global context in a way that goes beyond
rescaling and minimizes the risk of deductive reification. Against this background
and drawing from research on the global visual art field, the article offers criteria for
delineating a global field and distinguishes relative functional and vertical autonomy.
Finally, it discusses how the concept of ‘relative vertical autonomy’ contributes in
three ways to the development of global field analysis: for theorizing emergence; examining global-national interdependencies; and denationalizing Bourdieu’s concept of
‘national capital’.

Critical Realism Network, 2016

The importance of reflexivity for social-scientific research is a truism. And yet reflexivity can... more The importance of reflexivity for social-scientific research is a truism. And yet reflexivity cannot be overemphasized when one moves to the global level. There are great risks of reification when one deals with global data sources, or when one extends theories developed in view of a (Western) nation-state to explain often qualitatively different transnational or global phenomena. Some scholars in the field have completely given up on the goal of causal explanation. Some even demanded that social science should integrate elements of chaos theory, because that’s what the global is about—chaotic flows that cannot be packed into a neat analytical architecture. Of course these are extremes, but they indicate the particular challenges that come from engaging with global problems: How to account for the complexity, even “ontological openess” (Marginson 2008, p. 313) of the objects, their often over-determined nature, without completely giving up the search for patterns and explanations? W...

Art and the Challenge of Markets, edited by Victoria Alexander et al. London. , 2018

“Beyond Reproduction: Asymmetric Interdependencies and the Transformation of Centers and Peripher... more “Beyond Reproduction: Asymmetric Interdependencies and the Transformation of Centers and Peripheries in the Globalizing Visual Arts,” builds on insights of "Rethinking the Center-Periphery Model," but extends the question of the transformation of centers and peripheries also towards dynamics of artistic mediation. Based on additional sources on the diffusion of US American and non-Western contemporary art, interviews as well as global art discourse, I explore how globalization has affected the logic of selection of foreign artists. I argue that intermediaries’ strategies defy a binary logic of dominating Western centers vis-à-vis dependent non-Western peripheries. Specifically, I discuss how the “import” of acclaimed US American art in peripheral contexts is not just due to the dutiful adherence to the art of Western centers. Art institutions showcase dominant Western positions also as a currency to build up their own visibility and status in a global context, and to create a symbolic bridge for promoting their own artists. Conversely, Western centers have begun to increasingly exhibit artists from non-Western peripheries, and thus to foster “counter-flows.” My contribution underlines the need to move beyond simple models of domination among centers and peripheries as they prevail in sociological work on the globalizing visual arts, demonstrating how their relations become embedded in more multi-directional, yet asymmetric interdependencies.

Art in Public Spaces. Visual Arts Journal. (ISSN 23482508), 2016

In her book De la valeur de l'Art, Raymonde Moulin remarks that the relations between visual arti... more In her book De la valeur de l'Art, Raymonde Moulin remarks that the relations between visual artists and sociologists underwent several changes (Valeur de l'Art 13). In the late 1960s and early 1970s "avant-garde" artists began to show interest in critical sociology as a weapon against the art market and the museum. At this time a movement labelled as "institutional critique" emerged out of conceptual art, based on "an artistic practice that reflects critically on its own housing in galleries and museums and on the concept and social function of art itself " (Alberro and Stimson, Institutional Critique). This artistic movement meanwhile has seen three generations, the first one being associated with the New York Citybased Art Workers Coalition (AWC) (Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers 14) and with artists such as Marcel Broodthaers and Daniel Buren in Europe or Michael Asher, Robert Smithson, Hans Haacke, and Martha Rosler in the USA. Subsequently, idealist philosophy and cultural theory-especially in different variants of post-structuralism-gained discursive dominance and was the privileged partner of artists, curators, and critics in the discourses of the artistic field. Thus, in the 1980s sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu or Vera Zolberg could write that art and sociology do not go together (Bourdieu, Questions 207; Zolberg,1). Raymonde Moulin, however, mentions that in the "nineties again certain 'avant-garde'artists did show a critical attitude similar to sociology and were investigating the economical and social conditions of the construction of the value of art" (Moulin, "Heirs" 169). We want to elaborate on that observation in dealing with an exemplary project of artists belonging to the second generation of institutional critique, whose critical impetus often tried to transcend the confines of the artistic field. 1 Such developments make diagnoses like those of Bourdieu or Zolberg as time bound as the idea that the struggle between sociology and visual art is any longer about the 1-The "generations" of institutional critique and their critical impetus are differentiated and discussed in Bryan-Wilson, Julia. "A Curriculum for Institutional Critique, or The Professionalization of Conceptual Art".

Das Kunstfeld. Eine Studie über Akteure und Institutionen der zeitgenössischen Kunst am Beispiel von Zürich, Wien, Hamburg und Paris, 2012

Eine exemplarische Institution: Das Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst 2.1 Die Vernetzung des Muse... more Eine exemplarische Institution: Das Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst 2.1 Die Vernetzung des Museums im Zürcher und Schweizer Kunstfeld Valérie Knoll und Ulf Wuggenig 2.2 Die programmatische Orientierung des Museums Valérie Knoll und Ulf Wuggenig Inhaltsverzeichnis 2.3 Gründe für den Besuch von Ausstellungen 125 und Fragen der Kunstvermittlung

Annual Review of Sociology, 2010

This review suggests that the sociology of intellectuals is being converted into a sociology of i... more This review suggests that the sociology of intellectuals is being converted into a sociology of interventions, i.e., instead of focusing on a certain social type, it analyzes the movement by which knowledge and expertise are mobilized to inform a value-laden intervention in the public sphere. We first demonstrate that the classical sociology of intellectuals was centered on a problematic of

Nach Bourdieu. Visuality, Kunst, Politik. (trans. After Bourdieu. Visual Studies, Art and Politics), 2008

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Pu... more Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.ddb.de abrufbar. Bibliographic Information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.ddb.de.

Anlasslich eines Vortrags an der University of Chicago entwickelte Bourdieu (1991d) die Vision ei... more Anlasslich eines Vortrags an der University of Chicago entwickelte Bourdieu (1991d) die Vision eines Weltfeldes der Soziologie. Vor Augen schwebte ihm ein transnationaler Raum der rationalen Kommunikation und systematischen Konfrontation nationaler soziologischer Traditionen. Im grenzuberschreitenden intellektuellen Wettbewerb der Argumente, Theorien und Methoden sah er das Potential der Uberwindung partikularistischer Perspektiven auf soziologische Problemfelder im Zuge von deren sukzessiver, rationaler Universalisierung (ebd., 384) – und dadurch ein Potential fur »wissenschaftlichen Fortschritt« selbst. Bourdieu betonte, dass ein solches Weltfeld nicht quasi mechanisch als Effekt von global orientierten akademischen Institutionen entsteht oder von einer beschleunigten Zirkulation von Menschen, Ideen und Instrumenten erwartet werden konne (ebd., 374). Vielmehr erfordere die Bildung eines Weltfeldes die kollektive Reflexion uber die institutionellen und kognitiven Barrieren transnat...