Abstract
Within the contemporary art system complex, constantly-changing cultural features coexist with stratified acts of dealing. The art market operates as a collective mediation structure, developing a multiple agency: financial and economic, educational, political and social. In this article, we offer the result of an empirical test dedicated to the identification of unseen changes in the informal organizational pattern of the market. Observing the behavior of selected samples, we focused, firstly, on the networks of artists and commercial galleries at the Art Basel fair; and, secondly, on the group and solo shows organized by a relevant sample of international contemporary art museums and exhibitions spaces. These analyses offer an insight into the changes that occurred from 2005 to 2013, encompassing the quantitative growth of the art system infrastructure and the effects of the crisis of 2008.
Highlights
Within the contemporary art system complex, constantly-changing cultural features coexist with stratified acts of dealing
We considered the “art market” in a perspective that encompasses the economic and the cultural dimension of the exchanges
We decided to follow up on some of the choices made by a specific set of world galleries—the ones included in the Art Basel fair from 2005 to 2013—and to use the choices made by a sample of contemporary international art museums during the same time period as a control group
Summary
Complexity is a structural predicate of the contemporary art system (Danto 1964; Dickie 2000).. The American realm has been active, especially in the dawning moment of feminist art criticism, and has been a context where established by art historians, the hammered prices of artworks may rise on the basis of perfectly cynical and narrow financial strategies (Thompson 2008), or as the result of calculated strategies of symbolic capital acquisition (Bourdieu [1979] 1984) In this game, the prices themselves and their dynamics are part of the prestige and symbolic life of the artwork and thereby acquire specific cultural meanings (Velthuis 2003). The coexistence of these dimensions is a core feature that is reflected in the social agency of art practices and in the overall social relevance of the arts
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