Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Publication
    Regards sur la mondialisation. Le champ artistique en Chine et à Hong Kong sous l’égide du marché mondial de l’art
    The art market has not only expanded massively in volume since the end of the 2000s; it has become noticeably more globalized in regard to the actors and the institutions involved and to contemporary visual art itself. The attention of Western actors is today drawn particularly to Asia, and especially to China, whose rapidly growing economic power has been accompanied for a decade by a strongly expanding art market. At the same time, actors from the emerging markets arise with new power and their own demands. The paper is based on the results of an ethnographic research project, which focused on the positions and perspectives of the actors of the art world on the spot, their views on the current changes, the concrete practices in the Chinese and Hong Kong art markets respectively the art field in their specific socio-historical form and in their interweavement with the Western art world.
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  • Publication
    Kunst und Kapital. Zur Ökonomie symbolischer Güter am Beispiel einer Ethnographie der Art Basel
    Art fairs play today a central role in the art market, particularly in the trade of contemporary art. In the wake of the art fair boom since the turn of the millennium, they have grown to become one of the most important sales and marketing channels for art dealers. Through this distribution channel the gallery owners are able to gain access to new markets and reach new collectors. In 2012 for example, 36 per cent of sales by dealers were made through local or international fairs. Our research field is the Art Basel, which, as the “Art Olympics” (New York Times), represents the wealthiest sector of the art world in terms of symbolic and economic capital, and is generally considered as the most important art fair. The Art Basel represents a temporal and spatial concentration of the global art market; for a period of a week the field of art is located in the halls of the Basel Exhibition Centre. It is therefore an ideal field of investigation to examine the structures and dynamics at the top of the global art field. In reference to the sociological work and perspective of Pierre Bourdieu, the world of art is conceived as a field of competition for the monopoly of the legitimate definition of art. As a market of symbolic goods, the field of art is today more than ever confronted with immanent contradictions and paradoxes: since the 1990s new capital-intensive buyers have emerged, recruiting mainly from the world of financial capital; considerable financial resources flow directly from emergent economies in Eastern Europe and, above all, Asia into the market; prices are exploding and power relations between the different groups of actors in the art field are changing rapidly. The focus of interest of the ca. 80 qualitative interviews we made with market actors like art dealers or collectors is on their attitudes and practices in this newly reconfigured art field. In particular the question arises how the relationship between art and commerce, charisma and money, which is increasingly critical and contradictory through current changes in the art field, is addressed, problematized, scandalized, banalized or simply suppressed by the art market participants.
  • Publication
    Art Unlimited? Dynamics and Paradoxes of a Globalizing Art World
    (Transcript, 2016-03) ;
    Single, Erwin
    ;
    Köfeler, Raphaela
    ;
    Until recently still a blank spot on the world map of art, China today occupies one of the top positions in the rankings of the global art market and has moved into the center of the speculations and the covetousness of its protagonists. But what is really happening on the spot, beyond the ethnocentric distortions of the Western viewpoint? What social representations and uses of art can be identified? A research team from the University of St. Gallen has taken up such questions in an ethnographical field research project which enables the actors in this emergent and nonetheless already market-dominated art field to have their say.