Abstract
The study of crime and criminality in the art market has received increasing attention within criminology, however little has been written on the criminogenic values built into the structure of the art market. Despite increasing legislation to counteract instances of money laundering and fraud, the legal governance of the art market brings such ambiguity that actors in the market have formed their own responses to managing risk. In this article, we discuss how these actors rely on security bubbles and self-regulation and how this can have the unfortunate effect of adding to a criminogenic art market where white-collar crime is sustained. The dependence on self-policing created a field where powerful elites run things, and traditional policing agents have little purchase.
Highlights
In an episode of just over 5 minutes, Adam Conover, an American comedian and host of the popular web series Adam Ruins Everything, claims that the art market is a scam by arguing that it is a “self-proclaimed playground” for elite actors such as galleries, dealers, and auction houses
One such element is the creation of self-regulatory “security bubbles” in which socially embedded, self-interested collaborations and agreements arise between actors to manage risk, and take control of the security infrastructure that is lacking in this unregulated space
“regulation” literature promoted the idea of selfregulation in markets combined with external oversight in positive terms (e.g., Braithwaite, 1982)
Summary
In an episode of just over 5 minutes, Adam Conover, an American comedian and host of the popular web series Adam Ruins Everything, claims that the art market is a scam by arguing that it is a “self-proclaimed playground” for elite actors such as galleries, dealers, and auction houses. Actors within these bubbles prefer to rely on complex webs of insider networks, reciprocal linkages, and good faith practices rather than on external surveillance This may sound like an exemplary case of self-policing—a private market-based response to security that manages risk at no cost to the state—but there is a downside. We excerpt anonymized data from these prior studies in this paper by way of illustration where relevant In this sense, we are engaging here with a mosaic picture of crimes and regulatory adaptations in the art market, where a series of research snapshots of particular aspects of the market seems to suggest an overall pattern that deserves consideration in its own right. The data we have collected in our previous studies is combined here to develop a broad theoretical and empirical basis for our discussion of criminogenic market structures and symbolic security bubbles in the international art market
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