Although the global art market has often been resilient to international economic and political events, it has recently faced some of its biggest challenges under the influence of COVID-19. Among ...others, the pandemic and the accompanying restrictive administrative measures taken by world governments have significantly influenced such key economic indicators as gallery employment, art sales, and the organization of international art fairs. The Special Issue "Global Art Market in the Aftermath of COVID-19" studies various economic, social, and political impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global art market’s current state and future evolution.
•Five experimental studies examine gender discrimination in art judgments based on different criteria•Participants chose between male and female-originated artworks with/without artist information•We ...find evidence for statistical but not taste-based gender discrimination•Participants quasi discriminate on gender in a bias towards a correlated trait: artist fame
We conduct five experimental studies to examine whether and what kind of gender discrimination explains deep and persistent gender gaps in the art market. 1112 participants chose between male and female-originated artworks with and without artist information. Gender-specific artist names did not affect personal preferences or preference norms. They did however cause significant swings towards male artworks when participants were incentivised to guess the more pedigreed or more expensive artwork. When artist name information was controlled, manipulating artist fame information shifted preference norms towards artworks of males, who are more famous on average. Overall we find no taste-based but significant statistical gender discrimination. We also find quasi gender discrimination, in which discrimination based on a particular characteristic (fame) may be falsely attributed to a highly-correlated one (gender).
In a global economic landscape of hyper-commodification and financialisation, efforts to assimilate digital art into the high-stakes commercial art market have so far been rather unsuccessful, ...presumably because digital artworks cannot easily assume the status of precious object worthy of collection. This essay explores the use of blockchain technologies in attempts to create proprietary digital art markets in which uncommodifiable digital artworks are financialised as artificially scarce commodities. Using the decentralisation techniques and distributed database protocols underlying current cryptocurrency technologies, such efforts, exemplified here by the platform Monegraph, tend to be presented as concerns with the interest of digital artists and with shifting ontologies of the contemporary work of art. I challenge this characterisation, and argue, in a discussion that combines aesthetic theory, legal and philosophical theories of intellectual property, rhetorical analysis and research in the political economy of new media, that the formation of proprietary digital art markets by emerging commercial platforms such as Monegraph constitutes a worrisome amplification of long-established, on-going efforts to fence in creative expression as private property. As I argue, the combination of blockchain-based protocols with established ambitions of intellectual property policy yields hybrid conceptual-computational financial technologies (such as self-enforcing smart contracts attached to digital artefacts) that are unlikely to empower artists but which serve to financialise digital creative practices as a whole, curtailing the critical potential of the digital as an inherently dynamic and potentially uncommodifiable mode of production and artistic expression.
Since its publication in 1964, Australians have used the title of Donald Horne’s book, The Lucky Country, as a term of self-reflective endearment to express the social and economic benefits afforded ...to the population by the country’s wealth of geographical and environmental advantages. These same advantages, combined with strict border closures, have proven invaluable in protecting Australia from the ravages of the global COVID-19 pandemic, in comparison to many other countries. However, elements of Australia’s arts sector have not been so fortunate. The financial damage of pandemic-driven closures of exhibitions, art events, museums, and art businesses has been compounded by complex government stimulus packages that have excluded many contracted arts workers. Contrarily, a booming fine art auction market and commercial gallery sector driven by stay-at-home local collectors demonstrated remarkable resilience considering the extraordinary circumstances. Nonetheless, this resilience must be contextualised against a decade of underperformance in the Australian art market, fed by the negative impact of national taxation policies and a dearth of Federal government support for the visual arts sector. This paper examines the complex and contradictory landscape of the art market in Australia during the global pandemic, including the extension of pre-pandemic trends towards digitalisation and internationalisation. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative analysis, the paper concludes that Australia is indeed a ‘lucky country’, and that whilst lockdowns have driven stay-at-home collectors to kick-start the local art market, an overdue digital pivot also offers future opportunities in the aftermath of the pandemic for national and international growth.
Although the global art market has often been resilient to international economic and political events, it has faced some of its biggest challenges under the influence of COVID-19. Among others, the ...pandemic and the accompanying restrictive administrative measures taken by world governments have significantly influenced such key economic indicators as gallery employment, art sales, and the organization of international art fairs. This Special Issue studies various economic, social, and political impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global art market’s current state and future evolution.
THE PRICE OF ART Beckert, Jens; Rössel, Jörg
European societies,
20/5/1/, Volume:
15, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
How do prices for contemporary art come into being? Buyers of contemporary art face a problem of fundamental uncertainty, because what passes as quality is difficult to determine, and buyers can ...hardly estimate how a specific piece of art will perform as an investment. Since a market for contemporary art presupposes the possibility of at least limited rational purchasing decisions, uncertainty must be reduced. We argue that the value of an art work or artist originates in an intersubjective process of assessment and conferring of reputation by experts in the art field, such as gallery owners, curators, critics, art dealers, journalists, and collectors, who help establish the artistic reputation of a work or an artist. The quality signals emerging from the art field enable buyers to assess the economic value of art works. We tested this initial hypothesis against two datasets containing data on art prices and information from the biographies of artists.
The recent proliferation of data about art prices has been interpreted as the democratization of a formerly secretive economic sphere. Contesting this idea, I argue that such data is collected, ...controlled, and disseminated by international art dealers and auction houses for the purpose of reinforcing the myth of a single, integrated market for art. Through the analysis of presentation strategies in Gagosian Gallery's online viewing rooms and Sotheby's Mei Moses Index, I argue that dominant art world institutions use art history and price data to support the speculative value of artworks and to perpetuate knowledge asymmetries that reinforce their own epistemic authority. I debate whether Friedrich Hayek's conception of price as an unbiased aggregator of dispersed information is a useful way of conceptualizing speculative value in the art world. I conclude that, in contrast to Hayek's ideas, contemporary art market data is given the illusion of democratic dispersal while remaining within the purview of dominant institutions. The curation of knowledge involved in this process exacerbates art world inequality and risks sidelining the heterogeneous creative practices that populate a broad range of creative spheres.
After the recent publication of two previously unknown “Sasanian” silver plates depicting the renowned scene of the chariot of the Lunar God Mah, added to the other five known examples, this article ...reconsiders one specimen of this series of objects – here addressed as the “Rashy plate” –, the authenticity of which appears questionable. Three parameters are considered for discussing this plate: iconography, manufacturing technique and provenance, and all of them are contextualised in the period of the great exhibitions of Persian Art (between the 1930s and the 1960s). The outcome of these exhibitions, besides stimulating scholarly research on previously understudied artistic productions, was the consequent rising interest by museums and private collectors in art objects from the ancient Iranian world. The introduction of possible forgeries, such as the Rashy plate, coherently fits into this increasing demand of the art market.
Purpose
This paper aims to contribute to the literature on value creation by examining value within the visual arts market and arguing for a broader, socio-culturally informed view of value creation.
...Design/methodology/approach
The authors develop an original conceptual framework to model the value co-creation process through which art is legitimised. An illustrative case study of artist Damien Hirst demonstrates the application of this framework.
Findings
The findings illustrate how value is co-constructed in the visual arts market, demonstrating a need to understand social relationships as value is dispersed, situational and in-flux.
Research limitations/implications
The authors problematise the view that value emerges as a result of operant resources “producing effects” through working on operand resources. Rather, adopting the socio-cultural approach, the authors demonstrate how value emerges and is co-constructed, negotiated and circulated. The authors establish the need to reconceptualise value as created collaboratively with other actors within industry sectors. The locus of control is, therefore, dispersed. Moreover, power dynamics at play mean that “consumers” are not homogenous; some are more important than others in the valuation process.
Practical implications
This more distributed notion of value blurs boundaries between product and service, producer and consumer, offering a more unified perspective on value co-creation, which can be used in strategic decision-making.
Originality/value
This paper illustrates that value co-creation must be understood in relation to understanding patterns of hierarchy that influence this process.
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