Franz Schultheis

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.

Today’s public discourse on art revolves around the price of these priceless goods and numbers function as ciphers for the collective representations of art and its status in late capitalist society. Highly contrary assessments as to how the prices for these goods can be found, depending on the perspective taken. While it may seem that optimal transparency exists with regard to the market and the setting of prices, thanks to commercial databases readily available to everyone, ethnographic field work presents quite a different view. A Research group took the question on pricing to a particularly prominent institution of the art market, Art Basel, using a variety of methodological approaches such as qualitative interviews with gallerists, artists, Art Basel staff, curators, art advisors, art critics etc. In the interviews some unwritten rules for dealing with the pricing of works of art became apparent. Pricing in the field of art requires not just knowledge of the unwritten and often tabooed rules, but also an intuitive feeling for the game and the accompanying strategies. Our empirical findings confirm the existence of two different paradigms. One the one hand there is the image of pure market competition for singular goods with high prestige value. In this view, the pricing of art commodities seems determined in an ideal-typical manner by purely exogenous market-dynamic and competition-driven forces. On the other hand, the idea of a purely endogenous, “art-immanent” reading and appreciation of the intrinsic value of a concrete work of art is maintained, independently of its real or potential market value .

Abstract During the last two decades public administration and public services have undergone profound changes with far-reaching impacts on employment relations and working conditions. The paper presents the perceptions and lived experiences of workers affected by liberalization and privatization of public services. In doing so it focuses on workers’ ideas of fairness and dignity at work using the concepts of distribution, recognition and the public ethos of the common good and linking them to fundamental principles of justice. It is argued that the perception of inequalities as fair, while it is shaped by custom, is also being socially constructed during far-reaching changes. The analysis is based on a series of qualitative interviews conducted in Austria, Germany and Switzerland with postal-service workers, a sector well suited for the analysis because of the far-reaching changes in terms of market regulation, ownership of organizations, labour regulation, employment and working conditions.