Abstract
Since the French sociologist Raymonde Moulin developed her pioneering research in the 1960s, the art market has been continuously studied by social scientists. For several years now, art market studies have rapidly proliferated. Collectors and collections, though, have tended to draw more attention than professionals and dealers, which remain less analyzed. In this article, we intend to study the impact of the national factor on the gallery sector by using a ranking of the leading contemporary art galleries in the world that we ourselves developed. Having analyzed the construction of the most significant rankings in the art world that all focus entirely or partly on artists, we decided to create one for contemporary art galleries. The methodology that we used will be presented in the first part of the article. In its second part, we will analyze the territorial/national dimension that can be identified in the most important art fair in the world, Art Basel. We will comment on what is revealed by our ranking in terms of countries of origin associated with their share and diverse positions in the ranking. Finally, we will address the contribution that our ranking brings to the knowledge of so-called globalization.
Highlights
When Raymonde Moulin developed her seminal studies on the art market in the 1960s under the title Le marché de la peinture en France (Moulin [1967] 1987),1 she limited her analysis to the French context
While we developed the project of creating a ranking of contemporary art galleries and considered their respective economic weights as the best way of proceeding, both our knowledge of existing figures and of the social world of galleries convinced us that it was, impossible to do so
We elaborated an original ranking of contemporary art galleries trying to identify the “best” or the most renowned ones
Summary
When Raymonde Moulin developed her seminal studies on the art market in the 1960s under the title Le marché de la peinture en France (Moulin [1967] 1987), she limited her analysis to the French context. It is necessary to mention that in addition to huge differences in estimated totals, the details for each gallery could be even stronger and the various mistakes that are made can partially compensate each other when the amounts are summed up With this development, we wanted to show that properly estimating the global art market by including private transactions to determine the economic importance of each gallery is a mirage rather than a possibility as private sales can never be known with sufficient accuracy. We wanted to show that properly estimating the global art market by including private transactions to determine the economic importance of each gallery is a mirage rather than a possibility as private sales can never be known with sufficient accuracy It is often said in the art world that two of the leading galleries in the world, Gagosian and Pace, have been selling more than a billion dollars of works of art annually for years. While we developed the project of creating a ranking of contemporary art galleries and considered their respective economic weights as the best way of proceeding, both our knowledge of existing figures and of the social world of galleries convinced us that it was, impossible to do so
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