International Miniconference - Globalization of Contemporary Art Markets - Discussant (original) (raw)
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This book brings together recent, multidisciplinary, cutting edge research on the globalization of markets for contemporary art. Focusing on different regions including China, Russia, India, and Japan, the chapters in this book study the extent to which art markets have indeed become global. On the one hand, it focuses on organizations such as the art fairs, Internet platforms, and auction houses which have enabled global flows of contemporary art. It shows how art from places such as the Middle East has been transformed into a new asset class. On the other hand, the chapters highlight the multiple barriers which globalization has encountered in art markets. Although markets for contemporary art have indeed emerged across the globe, cross-border flows of works of art have remained comparatively insignificant. The reasons behind these barriers are explored. They include differences in taste across the globe, trade barriers in countries like India and Brazil, and vested interests of actors in local art worlds like Japan. This book recognizes the coexistence of various ecologies of contemporary art exchange and sketches the presence of resilient local networks of actors and organizations within art markets. Some chapters moreover argue that Europe and the United States continue to dominate the global market, especially when considering rankings of success and participation in the most prestigious commercial events such as Art Basel.
Globalization of contemporary art markets. Published in: European Societies (2013)
Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data, this article explores the extent to which Western art markets are globalized by focusing on the nationality of contemporary artists represented by art galleries in Amsterdam and Berlin. Far from the borderless world presupposed in the globalization literature as well as by art dealers themselves, galleries in both countries show a strong home bias, whilst American artists dominate in Amsterdam and Berlin galleries. The article explains this home bias by focusing on widely diffused organizational practices, business conventions and role models within market settings, which are the outcome of cultural globalization, but also pose barriers to art dealers' global aspirations.
The booming global market of contemporary art
The present economic and financial crises do not seem to particularly influence the global art market of contemporary art. In an attempt to understand this apparent opposition, I adopt a macro perspective, combining my own research ventures in Dakar and Vienna with general art market studies. I argue that this market is a special representation of millennial capitalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). The global art market puts in place an organization of diversity that allows a high flexibility in including specific centers and marginalizing others, as well as a special focus on a globally acting group of "ultra high net worth" individuals. Striking features are the concentration of capital flows to a few major centers, the constitution of complex, transnational networks, the dominant logics for each market field (gambling, glamour, moral economy), and the diversification of the commodity character of the work of art.
Paper, “Global Markets and Contemporary Art,” 22 pp.
Symphonya. Emerging Issues in Management, n. 2, 2006
Today’s contemporary art world has to come to terms with a highly unstable socioeconomic context that is evolving rapidly and constantly, with the result that any analysis to establish the state of the demand and supply of artistic goods and services in a global scenario is quite complex. The supply of contemporary art is renewed and must continue to be renewed, in line with the recent requirements of demand and with economic and technological changes.
Art Unlimited? Dynamics and Paradoxes of a Globalizing Art World
2016
Until recently still a blank spot on the world map of art, China today occupies one of the top positions in the rankings of the global art market and has moved into the center of the speculations and the covetousness of its protagonists. But what is really happening on the spot, beyond the ethnocentric distortions of the Western viewpoint? What social representations and uses of art can be identified? A research team from the University of St. Gallen has taken up such questions in an ethnographical field research project which enables the actors in this emergent and nonetheless already market-dominated art field to have their say.