This article attempts to show how East Asian art was sold and bought in Russia in the first decade after the revolution 1917 by taking the example of the State Museum of Oriental Art (SMOA) in ...Moscow. The emergence of the SMOA itself was a consequence of political change. East Asian art objects were of interest since the authorities wanted to demonstrate interest by the new state in its Eastern neighbours.The focus of this paper are the forms of sale to East Asian art the museum during the first decade after the Revolution (up to 1928). Until 1917, Asian art objects were mainly held in private collections. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the collectors of East Asian art were mostly industrialists, such as the brothers Sergei and Pyotr Shchukin. The Revolution of 1917 changed the situation: the free art market practically ceased to exist under the Bolsheviks, and the field of private collecting and museum development changed overnight. Nevertheless, buying and selling art was still possible in Russia during the first decades after the Revolution. While private and state museums, galleries, and libraries were nationalised, and the most important private collections were declared property of the new state, smaller private collections were available for sale. The article is based on non-published inventory books and other archive documents of the SMOA and of The State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). While available sources are limited, due to the lack of published archives, but also the irregular record-keeping typical for post-revolutionary chaos, the museum archive allows a closer look at the process of buying and selling East Asian art objects from a new angle.
The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, and the restrictions imposed by the social distance and the enforced confinement, are having an impact on the art markets globally. The aim of this ...article is to evaluate the impact of an external shock in the primary art market, using three countries as a case study: Portugal, Spain, and Brazil. These geographies have in common being at the margins in the art market’s main art hubs. It is intended to analyze how agents are responding to the new context, according to the data gathered within the gallery sector. The methods applied in the research are a combination of surveys carried out by the authors, field-based observation, along with an academic literature review, complemented by international and national reports analysis. The study’s main findings allow us to characterize the art market as a very resilient sector that energetically responded to the crisis, able to adapt and overcome challenges imposed by the new pandemic situation. Contemporary art galleries expanded digital activities, kept participating in art fairs hybrid models, continued to focus on internationalization, and pointed to the strengthening of public policies towards the sector and partnerships as key strategies to overcome the crisis.
This article develops an analytical framework to study the role of narratives in maikets and argues that there is a relationship between the structure and composition of narratives produced by market ...actors and market dynamics. With respect to theory, the article bridges the perspectives that study markets as cultures and as fields and draws from the organizational studies approach to the analysis of narratives. Two empirical cases of the crises narratives in the emerging contemporary art markets of Russia and India illustrate the use of the framework. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with artists and art dealers as well as observations in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, New Delhi, and Mumbai conducted between April 2012 and June 2013. The article shows that there is a widely shared crisis narrative with a coherent structure in the Indian art market. In contrast, fragmented and contested stories that lack narrative structure dominate in the Russian art market. The analysis of the first case highlights the narrative structure and shows the productive work it does in the Indian market—it provides a moral justification of existing market norms and produces a perspective for the future. The analysis of the second case focuses on the context of narrative production and connects the conflicting interpretations of the crisis in the Russian art market to contested hierarchies and persistent uncertainty.
Strategic decision-making in the volatile and uncertain art market is not only instigated by rational interpretation of the external environment, but also by expert-based intuition. This paper ...investigates organisational failure at Phillips auctioneers between 1999 and 2002, a period in which it was owned by the multinational luxury goods conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH). To analyse this case, we develop a conceptual framework for strategic sensemaking in art organisations that includes the processes of scanning, interpreting, strategising, acting and adjusting, which take place in non-linear and recursive patterns in supporting continuous loops of improvement. Our analysis identifies the merits of intuitive decision-making when realising a novel artistic and entrepreneurial vision which established Phillips as a boutique auction house. However, it also highlights the limitations of emotional and opportunistic decision-making which could lead to blinded management if any of the processes of strategic sensemaking is ignored.
•Introduces a conceptual framework of strategic sensemaking in art organisations•Investigates organisational failure at Phillips auctioneers between 1999 and 2002•Scrutinises the role of intuitive decision-making under conditions of uncertainty•Analyses how art organisations can avoid organisational failure through strategic sensemaking
This essay demonstrates how market prices for contemporary art flourished in the late nineteenth century, fell after 1900, and rose again in the 1960s. This discovery stands in contrast to previous ...twentieth-century art market studies, which have depended on the sales prices achieved by modernist and avant-garde artists. The artists who were financially successful before 1900 have been dismissed as commercial or academic. Arguing for the importance of high-end sales, the paper mostly relies on the primary and secondary premium sales data belonging to the Paris gallery founded by Adolphe Goupil and the New York gallery founded by Michael Knoedler. Using CPI to convert prices over time, premium sales prices for Old Master, Near Contemporary, and Contemporary Art are compared over a ninety-year period, from the 1860s to the end of the 1950s. Among the discoveries yielded by these data is how close prices for contemporary art matched prices for Old Master painting until the very end of the nineteenth century. The data also indicates that many more contemporary artists benefited from high prices during the nineteenth century than later living artists achieved until late in the twentieth century. What appears to have contributed to the rise and fall and rise again of contemporary art prices is the corresponding rise and fall and rise again of interest in contemporary art by superrich collectors. An international market fueled by such collectors appears have been essential in creating high prices for contemporary art.
"Invented" out of a history of colonial displacement and the modernist art movement, African art has long been valued for its supposedly precolonial and tribal qualities. Objects made within a ...traditional context are deemed as authentic, whereas others made for sale, often imitating traditional styles, are deemed as fake. While such a distinction continues to be upheld and perpetuated by different actors in the transnational African art trade, I argue that the regenerative vision of time and diversified geography of interactions have begun to challenge the pervasiveness and inconvertibility of authentic and fake in African art. Specifically, I use my study of the African art market in Lomé and a Chinese collection and display of African art in Beijing as starting points to look at the constructedness of authenticity, and the time and space of the fake. The aim of this article is to show the effects of market commoditisation and changing geographies of participation in reinforcing and destabilising the distinction of real and fake in African art.
The United States’ sanctions on Iran have limited the Iranian art market’s connections with the international art network. Galleries try to compensate for such limitations through online marketing ...and exhibition. Thus, the sanctions not only impact the form of marketing exerted by dealers but also directly influence the type of artistic production. Such changes also reshape the art market in the Arab states. The transition from tangible to intangible has become a strategy for the regional market to bypass the sanctions and develop business with the global collectors and institutions. A quantitative analysis was used to demonstrate the impact of the sanctions on the art market in Iran and the United Arab Emirates. This analysis examined all exhibitions in 12 commercial galleries in Tehran and Dubai from 2009 to 2019, statistically assessing the index of changes over this period and calculating the variations, particularly during the years of intensified sanctions. The study indicates how the propensity of galleries for a digitally networked economy is becoming a solution to reduce the impacts of the sanctions in order for the galleries to maintain their clientele of international collectors and dealers.
This article argues that as the market for art rises to prominence both economically and conceptually, the artwork becomes a form of 'fictitious capital' that threatens the ontological status of the ...object and forces reconsideration of the role of the museum. These issues are examined through the lens of empirical market data, contemporary art, and analytic aesthetics. David Carrier's conception of 'aesthetic atheism' is tested against the background of both recent developments in the art market and creative strategies that stage the disappearance of the artwork. It is argued that the proliferation of spectacular auctions, art fairs, and information about sales prices results in a new object of appreciation: the market itself. The result is that the market is 'aestheticized' and constituted as a unique sphere of social goods in which the values traditionally associated with art are displaced.
The market for paintings by well-known artists is booming despite widespread concern about art crime and difficulties in establishing provenance. Public law enforcement is imperfect, and court cases ...often are deemed problematic. So how is the thriving art market governed in practice? We analyze the protocols used by the top auction houses to identify and resolve problems of illicit supply—fakes, forgeries and items with defective legal titles—through the lens of institutional analysis. We uncover a polycentric private governance system in which different actors govern distinct but overlapping issue areas, motivated by profit, prestige, or the search for truth. When the financial stakes rise, opportunistic behavior undermines the credibility of private governance. We argue that as litigious, super-rich investors entered the art market, the interaction between public law and the traditional private governance system restricted the supply of “blue chip” art, driving the escalation of prices.
The rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has been astonishing, in particular for the arts and creative industries. The dominant discourse both in mainstream media and in academia today focuses ...predominantly on what this new technology can do for the art market rather than art itself. However, framing NFTs in art in the context of money and markets draws attention away from the more subtle and creative role of NFTs. Consequently, this article asks: What is the role of NFTs in art, beyond the market? This research complements existing empirical work, by conducting a case study and interviews with members of DADA, a historic NFT art project which is particularly critical towards the role of the art market. The findings foregrounded five roles that NFTs play in art: as (1) a tool for systemic change, (2) a new way to community, (3) a ritual artefact, (4) a means for preservation and (5) a new medium.
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