Franz Schultheis

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.

The Art Basel is more than just a fair in the commercial sense of the word, more than a temporally and spatially concentrated gathering of dealers offering their goods for sale to interested buyers. It is at the same time the site of a display of »holy« goods in the pres-ence of thousands and thousands of believers, a pilgrim's goal for the ritualized adoration of modern and contemporary art. It is also, and for precisely this reason, the decisive wit-ness of the upheaval marking a radical change in that relationship between »art« and »money« - with all the consequences, not least for the evaluation of what is to be re-garded as »genuine« art. The present study, the result of several years of sociological field work, attempts to draw a picture of this change as perceived by the participants, the or-ganizers of the fair, the gallerists, collectors, curators, art consultants and artists, as a central problem of the contemporary art scene. The authors, members of a research group of the University of St. Gallen, present in When Art meets Money a detailed study of the practice of the contemporary »picture market«, drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu's influential sociology of art.