Cosmopolitan Canvases. The Globalization of Markets For Contemporary Art

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Cosmopolitan
Canvases
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The Globalization of Markets
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for Contemporary Art
Edited by
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Olav Velthuis and Stefano Baia Curioni
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Making Markets Global

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1.1 Introduction
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Since the 1980s, markets for contemporary art and the contemporary art
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system more generally have been characterized by a wave of transformation
of impressive scale and scope, initiating processes whose origins, effects, and
implications still need to be fully described, analyzed, and interpreted.1
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Concentrated in art capitals such as New York, Paris, and London, these
markets used to be by and large confined to Northern America and Europe.
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In many other regions across the globe visual art made by living artists was
commodified, but art markets were relatively insignificant in quantitative
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terms and functioned in an informal, almost fully local, and hardly profes-
sionalized manner. Except maybe for some anthropologists interested in local
cultures, the outside world was hardly aware of them. Moreover, the art that
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was traded in these regions was likely to be decorative art, what is pejoratively
referred to as “primitive art” or the fruit of traditional craftsmanship (Belting
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2009). In communist countries such as China or the former Soviet Union the
commercial trade in art was hardly considered legal until the late 1980s.
In short, “contemporary art”—which in this volume denotes a privileged
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type of art made in the present, which is heavily institutionalized and which
1
The chapters in this volume were presented at the mini-conference Globalization of Markets
for Contemporary Art, which took place at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research of
the University of Amsterdam in October 2013. Financial support of the Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Sciences, the program group Political Sociology, and the program group
Institutions, Inequalities and Life courses of the University of Amsterdam is gratefully
acknowledged. This book is part of the research project Globalization of High Culture, which is
financed by a VIDI-grant of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). An earlier
version of this introduction was presented at the Culture Club of the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Thanks to its participants and to Svetlana
Kharchenkova and Nataliya Komarova in particular for helpful comments.
1
circulates in a specific organizational framework of contemporary art

museums, biennials, art centers, art galleries, and the like, and which is
made sense of by means of a specific art critical discourse constructed around
terms like innovation, originality, transgression, and critique—was mostly
foreign to these countries (Belting et al. 2013; Heinich 1998).
Over the last thirty years, this situation has changed radically. The notion of
contemporary art has diffused globally, and so have, at least to some extent,
the infrastructures and discourses which constitute its modern habitat. Mar-
kets for contemporary art have emerged in regions where they previously did
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not exist, and have transformed in regions where they did. The total amount
of fine art and antiques sold worldwide has exploded, not only in Europe and
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the United States, but also in the rest of the world. According to an annual
report published by The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF), one of the
world’s main trade fairs for fine arts, the art market grew 575 percent between
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1991 and 2012. The 2014 edition of the report estimates that the market for
fine art and antiques now amounts to 47.4 billion euros. Postwar and con-
temporary art accounts for 46 percent of this figure. With aggregate sales
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estimated at 11.5 billion euros, China today is the second largest market for
art and antiques in the world, after the United States (McAndrew 2014).
Signs of globalization are many at first sight. Auction houses report an
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influx of buyers from outside of Europe and the United States at their New
York and London auctions of modern and contemporary art—according to
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the auctioneers, collectors frequently new to the market, from dozens of

countries, now participate. Of the six bidders on Francis Bacon’s triptych
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Three Studies of Lucian Freud, which set the highest auction price ever in the
fall of 2013 when it sold for $142.4 million at Christie’s in New York, at least
two were Asian.2 Prestigious art dealers such as the New York-based Gagosian
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Gallery and Pace Gallery, or the London-based White Cube, have in recent
years opened offices in cities such as Hong Kong, Beijing, and in São Paulo
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among others (Chong 2011). Art auction data vendor Artprice.com reports
moreover that in the auction season 2012–13, the top twenty-five bestselling
contemporary artists worldwide listed eleven Chinese artists (Artprice 2013).
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And although no emerging art market comes close to China in terms of market
size, anecdotal evidence suggests that growth rates in India, Mexico, Turkey,
and Brazil for instance, have also been spectacular during at least parts of the
first decade of the new millennium. Africa, which until recently was the only
continent to remain by and large off the radar of the global art market, seems
to have been absorbed as well. An annual fair devoted to contemporary
2
“Expanding Buyer Base Drives Record Year at Christie’s with Art Sales of £4.5 billion ($7.1
billion), Up 16%.” Christie’s Press Release, January 22, 2014, <http://www.christies.com/
presscenter/pdf/2014/RELEASE_CHRISTIES_FIGURES_2013_EN.pdf> last accessed February 2014.
2
African art (called 1:54) has been established in London, while a growing
number of established European and American galleries now represent African
artists.
The result of these qualitative and quantitative changes is an increasing
complexity, interconnectedness, stratification, and differentiation of contem-
porary art markets. Our understanding of them is still in its early stages.
Empirical research in the field of globalization of high arts is still scarce, partly
due to the lack of systematic data. Focusing on different geographical regions
and market segments, as well as different institutions and organizations
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within the art market, the chapters in this volume study first of all the
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infrastructures that enabled the emergence of a global market or promise to
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do so in the future (Part I); second, they investigate the extent to which
markets for contemporary art are indeed global if measured by cross-border
flows of works of art and artists (Part II); and third, they look at the impact of
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globalization on the configuration, organizational dynamics, and lived experi-
ence of actors within local art markets (Part III). In doing so, the chapters
recognize the coexistence of various ecologies of contemporary art production
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and exchange and sketch the presence of resilient or innovative networks of
actors and organizations who function as gatekeepers at different geographic
and institutional levels.
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The book takes a multidisciplinary approach, and includes studies by econo-

mists, anthropologists, historians, and sociologists. While we are convinced
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that this approach makes for a richer, multifaceted perspective on the topic at
hand, the usual risks of disagreement on sound methodologies, misunder-
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standing of one another’s theoretical frameworks, and conceptual confusion

apply. Regarding the latter, this pertains as well to one of the central concepts
of the volume—globalization—which is without doubt one of the most poly-
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semic, contested, and contentious terms in contemporary social science

(cf. Harris 2011; Held and McGrew 2003). Indeed, the chapters do not use a
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single, shared definition of globalization. Instead, we alternate between three

different understandings of globalization of contemporary art markets: (1) the
emergence of markets for contemporary art across the globe and the develop-
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ment of institutional frameworks and organizational infrastructures which

enable these markets to function; (2) the cross-border sale of contemporary
art, for instance at a commercial gallery who sells the work of a foreign artist to
a local collector, or the work of a local artist to a foreign collector; (3) the
integration of local markets for contemporary art into a single, unified, inter-
connected global market or a transnational field of contemporary art, which
to a large degree has a shared institutional and organizational set-up (Kuipers
2011). As we will see throughout the book, the processes implied by these
three understandings of globalization do not necessarily coincide, a point to
which we will come back at the end of this introduction.
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What the chapters have in common is that they interrogate and scrutinize
the celebratory discourse which embraces the notion of a globalized art market
uncritically, and which is endorsed by a curious amalgam of artists, auction-
eers, art market pundits, curators, art journalists, and market researchers. In
some strands of the humanities, this discourse is embraced as well. These
strands write about the “deterritorialization” of art, emphasize the spread of
art biennials around the world, and argue that the art world has become more
inclusive (cf. Bydler 2004; Belting and Buddensieg 2009; Belting et al. 2013).
Or as the German art historian Hans Belting puts it in the catalog of the first of
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a series of exhibitions at the ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe
on the topic of globalization and contemporary art: “new art today is global”
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(Belting 2009: 40).
Within this celebratory discourse, metaphors like the “global village” and
“global community” are frequently used. The discourse focuses on the declin-
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ing power of gatekeepers in Europe and the United States in consecrating
contemporary art and claims that the “continuity of the Eurocentric view on
art” is being challenged (Belting 2009: 39). In interviews, art dealers talk
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likewise about the way the Internet has transformed their trade, making
deals with collectors hitherto unknown possible and facilitating contacts
with artists in distant regions. They tell numerous anecdotes to illustrate
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how borderless the art market has become, such as the one about a piece by
a Japanese artist they represented in Berlin, which they transported to an
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international art fair in Miami, where it was bought by a collector from Puerto
Rico, who had it shipped to his vacation apartment in Paris (cf. Velthuis 2013).
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One may even call this celebratory notion of a global art market a sign of
ideological prejudice, which does not so much describe as prescribe how artists,
auction houses, galleries, or collectors have to think and behave. Indeed, the
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British weekly The Economist noted that “local artist” has become a synonym
for insignificant artist and “national” damns with faint praise. “International”
is now a selling point in itself.3 Conversely, art dealers or collectors focusing
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on local artists are looked down upon as parochial.

In order to interrogate and, at times, criticize this discourse, we will dissect it
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into six interrelated assumptions, some related to the causes of the art market’s
globalization, others to its consequences. Either implicitly or explicitly, either
collectively or individually, these six assumptions are recurrently made by the
abovementioned curious clique of globalization’s cheerleaders: (1) the global-
ization of art markets is a new phenomenon which (2) reflects economic
globalization; (3) it is a linear, teleological process which (4) leads to a con-
vergence in the way contemporary art is traded across the world, which sets in
3
“Global Frameworks,” June 24, 2010, <http://www.economist.com/node/16423340> last
accessed January 2014.
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motion (5) intensive cross-border flows of art and brings about (6) a redistri-
bution of symbolic power from Europe and the United States to other regions
of the world. Note that some of these assumptions are not specific to art
markets, or, for that matter, to cultural globalization. They can also be
retrieved and have indeed been fiercely contested in what David Held and
Anthony McGrew call “the great globalization debate” (Held and McGrew
2003). Explaining how individual chapters address them, in the remainder of
this introduction each of these six assumptions will be discussed in more
detail. In some cases, an assumption will be straightforwardly refuted by the
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research presented in this book; in other cases, the verdict turns out to be
mixed. The introduction closes with a brief discussion of the main contribu-
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tions of the book to current social scientific literature on art markets and
cultural globalization.
1.2 Globalization of Art Markets is not New dM

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The first assumption that is frequently found within dominant understand-
ings of a global art market is that it is a new phenomenon; the symbolic
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starting date that is frequently mentioned is 1989, the year when the Berlin
Wall fell and the irreversible crumbling of the Soviet Union was initiated, but
also the year of the Paris Biennial exhibition Les magiciens de la terre at the
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Centre Pompidou and Parc de la Villette. This exhibition has widely been seen
as a path-breaking and visionary attempt to transform the “Western” art
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system into a global inclusive system.4 Curator Jean-Hubert Martin selected

fifty artists from “marginal” regions such as Africa, Asia, and Latin America,
alongside fifty artists from the “center.” By doing so, Martin sought to correct
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an art world in which “one hundred percent of exhibitions” ignore “80

percent of the earth.”
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The fall of the Berlin wall, and the end of communism which it symbolized,
allowed for commercial art markets to develop in countries where they previ-
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ously had not been. It moreover enabled various forms of cultural exchange
between artists of these countries, who had for a long time been by and large
cut off from artistic developments in the non-communist world. These polit-
ical and cultural events of 1989 supposedly set the globalization of contem-
porary art in motion. Indeed, one of the exhibitions on globalization at the
ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe was tellingly called The
Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989 (cf. Belting et al. 2013).
4
The exhibition materials and catalogue texts are available through: <http://magiciensdelaterre.
fr//home.php> last accessed May 2014.
5
Instead of seeing the globalization of contemporary art markets as a new

phenomenon, we argue that it has to be recognized as a permanent feature of
the historical sedimentation of art production, distribution, and consumption
(Guerzoni 2011; Miegroet and De Marchi 2006). Art has been sold across
borders and artists have lived nomadic lives from at least the Renaissance
onwards, not only looking for new sources of artistic inspiration but also for
new markets to sell their paintings. The leading centers of artistic production
in Renaissance Italy were frequented by “agents of princes and courts, inter-
national merchants, passing aristocrats, diplomats, or high-level prelates who
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usually purchased large quantities of merchandise at a given moment”
(Guerzoni 2011: 133). The art auctions of sixteenth-century Antwerp and
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seventeenth-century Amsterdam had, to some extent, an international
scope. One of the leading art dealers of the nineteenth-century art market,
Goupil & Cie, was headquartered in Paris but had branches in among others
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The Hague, New York, Vienna, Berlin, and Australia (Rewald 1973 [1986]), not
unlike contemporary powerhouses such as Gagosian or David Zwirner who
have gallery spaces all over the world (Chong 2011). Before the communist
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revolution of 1917, wealthy Russian citizens like Ivan Morozov and Sergei
Shchukin were avid collectors of modern French art of their day, buying
paintings by Monet, Gauguin, and Degas (see e.g. Kostenevich 1990). More-
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over, the present-day cosmopolitan collectors who make their wealth in one
part of the world but spend it on contemporary art in another part seem to be
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reincarnations of nineteenth-century figures like J. P. Morgan or Henry Frick,

who bought works by Italian Renaissance painters, Dutch old masters, and
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French impressionists in large quantities.

These cross-border flows were not limited to Europe and the United States.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, artists like van Gogh were
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inspired by Japanese prints, Picasso by “primitive” African art, and Gauguin

by the art of Polynesia. In the twentieth century, cities like New York or Paris
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served as magnets for artists from various regions of the world, not limited to
“the West” (Crane 1987; Guilbaut 1983). The cultural anthropologist Thomas
Fillitz has pointed at the wide range of historical connections—both colonial
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and postcolonial—between African artists and their Western counterparts

(Fillitz 2009). More recently, the extraordinary boom in the market for impres-
sionist art of the 1980s resulted partially from the influx of Japanese art
collectors and speculators (Watson 1992).
If these historical antecedents of the global art market are recognized at all,
they are usually seen as a form of pre-history, cut off from the trajectories of
current global markets, and can therefore be safely ignored. Instead, some
chapters in this book claim that for a better understanding of our own market
era, going back in time further than “1989” is necessary. For instance, Filip
Vermeylen shows how modern Indian artists around whom the contemporary
6
art market evolved in New Delhi and Mumbai, started their careers in the
1940s and 1950s, heavily influenced by European modernist art. Some of
them the so-called Progressive Artists’ Group, who are now among the coun-
try’s most coveted artists, received their education at British art schools in
India and were exposed to modernism during their extensive travels in Eur-
ope. As Mukti Khaire and Daniel Wadhwani put it, the progressive painter’s
style “developed at the intersection of traditional Indian visual themes and
international artistic influences and dealt with the visual challenges of
expressing 20th-century Indian culture and identity and its liminal place in
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the modern word” (Khaire and Wadhwani 2010: 1290).
Likewise, in Chapter 10 Amanda Brandellero shows how an elaborate sup-
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port structure for modern art was created in postwar Brazil, when various
modern art museums were founded in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The
country, which is now heralded in the media as one of the rising stars of the
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global market firmament, has had a lively art scene for good parts of the
twentieth century. In 1951, the São Paulo Biennial, after Venice the world’s
second oldest biennial, was established there. By the end of the 1950s dozens
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of galleries were already operating in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, often
established by Italian, German, or Romanian immigrants who had fled Europe
during the Second World War. Competing with auction houses, these galleries
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not only sold to middle class Paulista clients, many of them of Jewish descent,
but also to foreign buyers (cf. Durand 1989).
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In short, instead of representing the globalization of art markets as a recent,

new era in the market, it is safer to speak about waves of globalization.
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Although the current wave—which is characterized among others by the

(re)emergence of art markets outside of Europe and the United States, and by
attempts to integrate these markets into what may be called a single global
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market—is particularly strong, this book recognizes that it has been preceded
by earlier waves. That is all the more important since history matters. The
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contemporary situation cannot be fully understood without considering its

continuities with the legacies left by other waves of ancient and modern
globalization of art markets.
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1.3 Globalization of Art Markets Does not Just

Reflect Economic Globalization
A second assumption in current accounts of the globalization of contempor-

ary art markets is that it results from or mechanically reflects economic
globalization. The prolonged high economic growth in previously peripheral
or semi-peripheral parts of the world economy such as Brazil, Russia, India,
and China (alluded to as the BRIC countries, an acronym invented by Jim
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400
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1987
1989
1991
1993
1995
1997
1999
2001
2003
2005
2007
2009
2011
2013
Figure 1.1. Number of billionaires worldwide
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Source: Data obtained from Forbes <http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/>
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O’Neill, an economist at Goldman Sachs, in 2001), the entrepreneurial possi-
bilities which economic liberalization offered, the end of the debt crisis in
Latin American in the 1990s, and, around the same time, the privatization of
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government property which, in countries like Russia, was executed in a wild,

uncontrolled fashion, resulted in rapidly growing middle classes and a new
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elite of super-rich citizens. According to Forbes, the number of billionaires in

the world has increased from 140 in 1987 to 1,426 in 2013 (see Figure 1.1). In
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order to explain the current boom of the global market, commentators usually
do no more than invoke such numbers. As Anders Petterson of art market
analysis firm ArtTactic assesses the health of the global art market: “It doesn’t
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feel like there are any dramatic clouds on the horizon. I just look at the Forbes
list of 2013 where you have more than 1,400 billionaires.”5
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It is the mechanistic nature of the relationship between economic and

cultural globalization which this book questions. It shows that new wealth
may be necessary for contemporary art markets to emerge and develop, but it
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surely is not sufficient. To begin with, we need to account for the ways in
which this new wealth is (or is not!) channeled to contemporary art. This book
does so in three ways. First of all, it shows how new, aspiring elites who are
characterized by instable identities and status anxiety, have developed a taste
for art. As Olga Kanzaki Sooudi formulates it in her ethnographic account
of the Mumbai contemporary art world in Chapter 12, “the dramatic
Cited in Paul Casciato, “Bacon, Warhol Sales to Test Health of Global Art Market,”
5
Reuters October 15, 2013 <http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/15/us-art-market-sales-

idUSBRE99E0MQ20131015> last accessed May 2014.
8
diversification of available commodities, along with a burgeoning middle class

with increased disposable income, ushered in an era of status consciousness
enacted through aspirational and conspicuous consumption.” Alongside
other luxury goods such as branded commodities, expensive wines, and resort
holidays, they have singled out art, and contemporary art in particular, in
order to construct new, often cosmopolitan, identities. It allows these new
economic elites, in a double process first analyzed by Georg Simmel in his
classic essay on fashion (Simmel 1957 [1904]), to construct identities which
differentiate themselves from the lower social strata that they were, often not
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more than some years or a single decade ago, part of; at the same time, art
consumption enables them to confirm their membership of a new class of
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upwardly mobile compatriots, or even broader, of a new, global, cosmopolitan
elite which engages in similar conspicuous consumption patterns as they do.
In short, collecting contemporary art has become one of the key “passion
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investments” of a rapidly expanding group of “high-net-worth individuals,”
to put it in terms of consultancy firm Cap Gemini in its annual World Wealth
Reports. It is now part of a cosmopolitan lifestyle embraced by a new economic
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and urban elite, and is characteristic of societies where economic inequality is
sharply on the rise (cf. Fraser 2011; Goetzmann et al. 2010).
The second way in which this book contributes to understanding how
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global wealth has been channeled to art, is by showing how new economic
elites have recognized art as a potential investment opportunity. The question
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regarding the extent to which art constitutes a good investment, offering

possibilities for diversification and higher returns than a traditional portfolio
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of stocks and bonds, has been disputed for at least two decades, both in
academia and in the market itself (see Goetzmann et al. 2010; Mei and
Moses 2002 for overviews). Although to date there has been no consensus,
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there is evidence that the interest in art from new middle classes is driven to
some extent by investment motives. In Brazil, China, and India, among
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others, investment funds focusing on art have been established. Like in Euro-
pean and American art markets this happened predominantly during boom
years, when art prices were steadily rising (Velthuis and Coslor 2012). When
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the art market in these countries slowed down or, in India, crashed in the
aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, many of these art investment funds
had to fold. Speculative interest in Chinese contemporary art has been further
fueled in a niche of the art market populated by art exchanges, dozens of
which were established between 2009 and 2012. At these exchanges, with
names such as Shanghai Cultural Assets and Equity Exchange, shares in a work
of art could be bought and sold, akin to shares in companies traded on the
stock market. As a result of, among others, government measures to curtail
9
speculative investment more generally, many of these exchanges turned out

to be short lived.6
In Chapter 7, Roman Kräussl identifies modern and contemporary art pro-
duced in the Middle East as the latest region of interest to art investors.
Istanbul has recently developed into a global capital for contemporary art,
with a number of private museums, a biennial with a strong reputation, and a
lively art scene. Moreover, demand for contemporary art has been strong in
Turkey, which hosts almost as many billionaires as France and Japan com-
bined. Kräussl studies the extent to which the investment interest of wealthy
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Turkish buyers in art has, over the period 2000–12, paid off. Constructing an
index which consists of 3,544 works made by 663 artists, he finds that the
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annual return on Middle Eastern art was 13.9 percent. In other words, adjust-
ing for various characteristics of a work of art (such as the size of the work or
the medium in which it was made), the auction price of an average work of
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Middle Eastern art increased 13.9 percent per year over the period 2000–12.
A third and final way in which this book corrects the mechanical way in
which economic prosperity is supposed to drive cultural globalization, is by
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focusing on the cultural infrastructures which have been developed in many
countries. These infrastructures have enabled new wealth to be channeled to
art. Auction houses are one key part of them. They have made persistent
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efforts to cultivate the interest of the new middle classes and to create markets
for modern and contemporary art produced outside of Europe and the United
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States, for example by developing separate market categories and sales for
modern and contemporary art from Latin America, Asia, Russia, or India
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(Khaire and Wadhwani 2010). In doing so, the world’s two main auction
houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, have evolved into huge and integrated deal-
ing systems with hundreds of employees scattered over a large number of
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international art capitals.

Another organization which has been crucial in channeling new middle
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class wealth to contemporary art is the art fair. While fairs used to be few, and
far from important until the 1990s, they are now seen as the art market’s main
events. More than 250 art fairs take place worldwide annually. At these fairs,
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on average more than 150 galleries participate to show and sell modern and
contemporary art (Baia Curioni 2012). They are venues where international
galleries meet their collectors, often from distant regions. Moreover, as
Vermeylen shows, fairs are important cultural events for local art worlds,
with tens of thousands of visitors, side shows of contemporary art in public
venues, series of talks and debates by well-known curators, collectors,
intellectuals, and artists who are flown in from all over the world, book
6
See e.g. <http://www.centerpieceadvisory.com/archives/326> and <http://leapleapleap.com/
2011/12/art-equity-trading-a-new-ponzi-scheme/> last accessed May 2014.
10
launches, and, for the art scene’s inner circle, a full agenda of parties and after-
parties. They have, in short, developed into one of the nuclei of the new upper
middle classes’ leisure life.
1.4 Globalization of Art Markets is Not a Teleological Process
A third, related assumption in the dominant discourse on globalization of art

markets which is questioned in this book, is that it is a linear, irreversible,
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teleological process. In this process, which is propelled by the economic
engine described above, national borders would become less important and
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cross-border flows of art and artists would continuously grow. Analogous
to Francis Fukuyama’s erstwhile popular thesis in his bestseller The End of
History and the Last Man (Fukuyama 1992) that all nation states are on a path
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toward democracy-cum-free-markets, all countries would become increasingly
enchanted by the idea of contemporary art and would without hesitation
adopt its concomitant cultural and economic infrastructures. As the British
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cultural entrepreneur and China specialist Philip Dodd summarizes the
received wisdom when it comes to the demand side of the market: “Typically,
people from recently emerged economic regions start by buying their own art,
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often 19th century; they then move to local contemporary art, and then on to
international contemporary” (cited in Ciotti 2012: 637). To which art critic
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Vincent Bevins writing about the Brazilian art market adds: “once the rich
move into more ‘sophisticated’ consumption patterns—art collecting, for
Co
example—they don’t usually go back.”7

The chapters in this book show that reality is more complex, however. The
timing and trajectories which emerging countries have experienced in devel-
w-
oping their own markets for contemporary art diverge widely. Moreover, the
different degrees to which other regions of the world have developed an
vie
interest in these markets, raises questions. For instance, why has Brazil, of all
Latin American countries, been successful, developing its art market even in
times of financial crisis, and penetrating global gatekeeping structures such as
Pre
the world’s most prestigious fair Art Basel at a relatively early point in time?
Why has Japan, the world’s third biggest economy, remained by and large off
the map of global contemporary art? Why has the market for modern and
contemporary art developed much more rapidly in China than in India, and
why have Chinese contemporary artists been much more successful inter-
nationally than their Indian counterparts? Why did Russia have its moment
in the spotlight of the global market early on, in the late 1980s and early
7
Vincent Bevins, “Market Forces: Where is Brazil’s Economy Going?” Art Review, September
2013, <http://artreview.com/features/september_feature_market_forces/> last accessed May 2014.
11
1990s, when European and American collectors were willing to pay record
prices for Russian underground art (Solomon 1991), and why has it failed to
remain in the spotlight ever since?
To understand these different trajectories, several more fine-grained and less
mechanistic explanatory strategies are developed here. First of all, some of the
contributions point at the institutional specificities which have blocked the
smooth development of art markets. Both Brandellero and Vermeylen note
that in the Brazilian and Indian art markets respectively, tax structures, import
tariffs, and customs duties make foreign actors refrain from entering the
l
ria
market. In other words, some government interventions, instead of promot-
ing local culture on the global stage (Crane 2002), may actually hinder their
ate
emergence, albeit unintentionally. To what extent such barriers turn out to be
persistent depends, for example, on the ability of local actors to organize
themselves. For instance, while Brazilian galleries have established a gallery
dM
association whose goals include professionalization of the sector, and who
have lobbied intensively with the government to remove unfavorable tax
structures and import/export barriers, Indian galleries have not succeeded in
hte
establishing an organizational framework which enables them to overcome
dilemmas of collective action.
Second, power structures within local art worlds, where actors have vested
rig
interests which are threatened by globalization, may be a source of resistance.

In his contribution on the Japanese art world, Adrian Favell argues that
py
international curators never got a strong foothold in Japan (Chapter 11).

This lack of access is crucial because curators usually facilitate the globalization
Co
of contemporary art: partially because they are able to physically connect

different art worlds through their permanent travels (cf. Bydler 2004), and
partially because an element of their work is to introduce and “mediate” art
w-
produced in one region to audiences in other regions (cf. Heinich 2012;

Kuipers 2011). The reason that international curators did not gain good access
vie
to Japan is related to the structure of its art world. Favell characterizes this
world as a “long standing, heavily institutionalized structure with a hierarchy
of educational, museum, and public institutions. Careers, positions, and influ-
Pre
ence are intensely competitive and dominated by parochialism. ( . . . ) Modern

art worlds in Japan were dense and highly developed in a way they were not
yet elsewhere in Asia. Controlled within the competitive field of Japanese
curators, they have collectively never let the foreign curators in.”
Third, some contributions focus on the role of institutional entrepreneurs
(DiMaggio 1988), who have attempted to “make markets” where previously
there were none, by cultivating taste, fostering ties to foreign art worlds,
organizing recognition for “their” artists, and getting collectors interested.
In Brandellero’s account of the Brazilian art market (Chapter 10), one of
those entrepreneurs is the art dealer Marcântonio Vilaça, “a figure who has
12
achieved near-mythical status due to his visionary and relentless projection of

artists abroad.” Until his death in 2000, he successfully created markets and
developed careers for artists at his Camargo Vilaça Gallery in São Paulo. Some
of them, such as Beatriz Milhazes, Ernesto Neto, or Adriana Varejao, are now
among Brazil’s best-known contemporary artists.
Another example of such an institutional entrepreneur is Johnson Chang, a
Hong Kong-based curator, collector, and art dealer, who was interested in the
mainland Chinese art world from its inception in the 1980s onwards, and had
excellent local and international networks which enabled him to “export” his
l
ria
exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art to Europe and the United States,
among other places. Moreover, he successfully teamed up with Li Xianting,
ate
at the time China’s most influential art critic. As a contemporary Chinese
reincarnation of what White and White called the dealer-critic model (White
and White 1965), the couple would be instrumental in the development of
dM
global interest in Chinese contemporary art (Kharchenkova and Velthuis
forthcoming).
hte
1.5 Globalization of Art Markets Cannot Be Equated

with the Diffusion of Western Blueprints
rig
If the globalization of art markets is seen as a teleological process, its telos is

py
frequently assumed to be an art market which is organized using European/

American blueprints. This would be the only way in which art can be traded
Co
efficiently and legitimately. The key blueprint is the European/American

gallery model, also alluded to as the aforementioned dealer-critic model
w-
(White and White 1965). This model was introduced in France in the second
half of the nineteenth century. It stipulates that the art dealer represents and
promotes the work of a limited group of artists, and tries to build and stabilize
vie
the market for their work by having museum directors, curators, critics, and
other actors without a direct financial interest in the market consecrate the
Pre
artist’s work . Together with the dealers, these actors operate as gatekeepers to
the art market (Beckert and Rössel 2013). Once the artistic value thus gets
established, the economic value of the work can start to rise.
Specifically for emerging art markets like China or India, the assumption of
both local and foreign actors is that they will remain unstable, unprofessional,
wild (Pollack 2010), or as they put it themselves “immature” as long as Western
models and blueprints of art galleries, auction houses, museums, and other
market organizations are not implemented. Once they are, the idea is that the
13
market will become more transparent, stable, and orderly, while trust in the
value of contemporary art will be secured.8
The chapters in this book do not deny per se that Western models of
conducting art business are diffused around the world. One obvious example
of this diffusion is the gallery model, which has frequently been adopted from
Europe and the United States: galleries in emerging art market countries such
as Mexico, China, or Argentina tend to operate out of the symbolically loaded
white cube spaces, which resemble those of New York, Berlin, or London. Just
like their European and American counterparts, they are frequently located in
l
ria
what used to be industrial zones of the country’s art capitals and which have
now been converted into lively art districts; the galleries indeed represent and
ate
promote a relatively small group of artists and try to make a market for these
artists (Velthuis 2005). Moreover, the model of the art fair, where between 100
and 300 galleries get together, showing a variety of art in a small booth during
dM
four or five days, has been widely adopted. More profoundly, the very notion
of contemporary art itself has spread across the globe. As art critic Peter Weibel
puts it: “To speak about art as contemporary art is already the effect of global
hte
transformations” (Weibel 2013: 25; Hest 2012: 24).
These diffusion processes either take a mimetic or a normative form: starting
galleries or developers of art districts in emerging countries regularly claim
rig
that they were inspired by their counterparts in Europe and the United States,
whose practices they imitated on a voluntary basis. Normative isomorphism
py
occurs for instance when a prestigious international art fair such as Art Basel
only admits galleries if they operate according to specific norms and stand-
Co
ards, which are thus implicitly enforced upon them.

However, this book shows that the diffusion of “Western” market models is
far from complete. Local actors have ample opportunities to “glocalize” these
w-
models by adjusting them to their own needs and contexts (Watson 1997;
Nederveen-Pieterse 2002). For instance, in China the business model of Sothe-
vie
by’s and Christie’s has been copied from the 1990s onwards, but it has been
put to use in different ways: auctions can for instance be found on the primary
market in China, to sell new works of art straight out of the artist’s studio,
Pre
which would be highly unusual and illegitimate in Europe and the United
States (Pollack 2010; Velthuis 2011).
Moreover, the diffusion of global models does not mean that local organ-
izations have been completely erased. As Svetlana Kharchenkova, Nataliya
Komarova and Olav Velthuis argue in their contribution on the Russian and
Chinese art market (Chapter 4), what they call Official Art Organizations
8
See e.g. Alexandre Errara, “Five Myths About Chinese Contemporary Art,” Forbes, January 21,
2014 <http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandreerrera/2014/01/21/the-five-myths-about-chinese-
contemporary-art/> last accessed May 2014.
14
(OAOs) of the Soviet and Mao era have survived and continue to be influen-
tial. This persistent influence is partly due to the heavy historical institution-
alization of these OAOs, their complementarity to wider organizational
structures including the state apparatus from which the OAOs cannot be
decoupled, and their resilience to adaptive pressures due to different forms
of path dependency (Mahoney 2000). Indeed, Kharchenkova, Komarova, and
Velthuis advocate a “varieties of capitalism” approach to art markets, which
recognizes that local organizational systems are able to resist the adaptive
pressures and convergence tendencies of globalization (Hall and Soskice
l
ria
2001). Although the OAOs may be an extreme instance, more subtle varieties
of the way art markets are organized can be retrieved across the globe.
A final qualification of the assumption that Western blueprints of art mar-
ate
kets are diffused, is to point at counterflows of organizational patterns, where
Europe and the United States are adopting rather than diffusing market infra-
dM
structures (cf. Crane 2002). For instance, Damien Hirst’s successful and widely
discussed 2008 sale Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, in which he sold new
works of art by auction and bypassed his dealers, could be seen as inspired by
hte
Chinese market practices (Velthuis 2011). Likewise, in Chapter 5 Mukti Khaire
shows that Indian entrepreneurs were among the first to successfully use the
Internet for auctioning modern art. They developed an innovative e-auction
rig
platform in order to redress a modern Indian art market, which “was largely
unstructured, with limited if any pricing transparency, long stagnant periods,
py
and difficulties in determining the authenticity of works, all issues recursively

related to sporadic buying and selling of artworks and limited exposure in the
Co
global fine art market.”

w-
1.6 Globalization of Art Markets Does not Result

in a Global Ecumene
vie
The fifth assumption within the prevailing globalization discourse which is

interrogated in this volume is that cross-border flows of art sharply increase,
Pre
and will come to dominate the market. As a result of these flows, a profound
“mixing” of nationalities across art worlds would characterize the global art
market (Quemin 2006), leading to what one may call a global ecumene of
contemporary art (Hannerz 1992). In this ecumene, the market for an artist
coming from the Middle East for example, may be globally dispersed: he may
be represented by a gallery in Brazil, collected by art lovers in Europe, and sold
at auctions in Hong Kong.
This volume questions this claim in a number of different ways. First of all,
although exports have increased worldwide by 500 percent by value over the
last twenty-five years and now amount to 18 billion euros, it should be noted
15
Italy, 1 Germany, 1 Austria, 1 Sweden, 1

Switzerland, 2
France, 6
Rest of the
world, 6 US, 38
UK, 20
l
ria
China, 24
ate
Figure 1.2. Global art market share (%) by value (2013)
dM
Source: TEFAF Art Market Report 2014: 22 (McAndrew 2014)
hte
that global art sales are dominated by three countries only: the UK, the US,
and China. Together they account for no less than 82 percent of the total
rig
global market. Countries like India, Brazil, Russia, Turkey, Mexico, and many
others, tellingly grouped as “rest of the world” in the TEFAF Report, together
py
only account for 6 percent of global art sales (see Figure 1.2). Moreover, of all
the world’s exports of art and antiques, 65 percent originate in the US and the
Co
UK. The reason is that the main art auctions continue to take place in New
York and London, where the top segment of the art market is centered and
where record prices are set (McAndrew 2014: 63). The report notes, by con-
w-
trast, that for emerging markets, “reported flows of art and antiques remain
relatively low” (McAndrew 2014: 72).
The few existing academic studies on cross-border flows of contemporary
vie
art, their makers, and intermediaries confirm this picture of a relatively global
top segment concentrated in London, New York, and a few other centers on
Pre
the one hand, and a host of local markets on the other. In particular, a home
bias, i.e. a focus of organizations and individuals on local artists, is a recurrent
feature in these studies. For instance, Alain Quemin finds that even the
world’s most prestigious museums (e.g. Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, and
the Museum of Modern Art in New York) are more likely to exhibit the work of
artists of their own country (France, the UK, and the US respectively) (Quemin
2006). Cultural economists Lasse Steiner, Bruno Frey, and Magnus Resch find
a strong home bias in private art collections: 89 percent of South American art
collections are composed of works made by South American artists. For Asian,
North American, and European collections the figures are respectively 82, 76,
16
45.0
40.0
35.0
30.0
25.0
l
ria
20.0
15.0
ate
10.0
5.0
dM
0.0
hte
ar
72
75
78
81
84
87
90
93
96
99
02
05
08
11
ye
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
20
20
20
20
Relative presence of German galleries
rig
Relative presence of Swiss galleries

Relative presence of American galleries
py
Figure 1.3. Share of galleries at Art Basel by nationality

Co
Source: artfacts.net
and 43 percent. The authors attribute this in part to the continuing existence
w-
of strong export and import restrictions (Steiner et al. 2013).

Even at Art Basel, which is considered to be the market’s most global fair,
Swiss and German galleries have a very strong presence (more than a quarter of
vie
all galleries exhibiting in Basel are based in these two countries, see Figure 1.3).
Historically, this bias of art fairs should not be surprising. Although they are
Pre
now seen, together with biennials, as the global art organizations pur sang, the
origins of the fair are rather different: local instead of global. The first art fair,
Kunstmarkt Köln (1967), was launched by the German art dealers Rudolf
Zwirner and Hein Stunke in an attempt to breathe life into the German art
market, especially in the light of the booming American art scene (Mehring
2008). Seventeen other galleries participated in the first fair. All were German.
Of all galleries at the first Art Basel events (the first took place in 1970), around
two-thirds came from either Switzerland or Germany. Many of the less presti-
gious fairs in the world continue to attract predominantly local galleries (see
also Halle and Tiso 2008).
17
Finally, Velthuis finds a strong home bias at galleries in Amsterdam and

Berlin: almost half of all the artists they represent are born in the country
where the gallery is located (Velthuis 2013). He understands this pattern as the
result of local search strategies, local support systems, the “club” character of
galleries, and trust relationships between artists, gallerists, and collectors which
art markets depend on. In short, physical proximity poses strategic advantages
in art markets, just like it does in other cultural industries (Scott 2006).
In the scarce research on the Internet and art markets, this very need for
proximity and physical, tactile interactions, not just between actors but also
l
ria
between an actor and a work of art, has been mentioned as one of the main
reasons why the art market has been spared the radical disintermediation
ate
which other cultural industries—the music industry in particular—witnessed
in the new millennium. Although websites of different sorts (auction price
databases, websites such as artnet.com where works for sale on the secondary
dM
market can be listed, or gallery websites which contain biographies of the
artists who are represented) have significantly reduced transaction, informa-
tion, and search costs for buyers, most attempts to establish actual sales
hte
platforms on the Internet have until now failed (see e.g. Horowitz 2011).
This systematic failure has so far depleted the art market of one of its potential
engines of globalization, and may have enabled a home bias to persist.
rig
The home bias appears in the results of at least two contributions to this
book. In Chapter 2, Vermeylen finds at the India Art Fair, the country’s main
py
fair, that 60 percent of the galleries that participate and another 60 percent of
the artists whose work is exhibited are Indian (see also Ciotti 2012). In the
Co
booths of Indian galleries at the fair, foreign artists are by and large absent
because “international art continues to be a hard sell in India.” Another
interesting finding of Vermeylen is that the Indian art market is in some
w-
respects becoming less global and more local: the non-resident Indians
(NRIs) who were important in the emergence of the Indian art market, since
they were among the first to develop an interest in modern and contemporary
vie
Indian art, are slowly being substituted by local, resident Indian art lovers.
In Chapter 6, Luc Renneboog and Christophe Spaenjers point at the per-
Pre
sistent geographical segmentation of art markets. They find that what gets
sold at auction is predominantly domestic art (created by an artist who was
born in the country where the auction house is located). Even for the most
globalized countries, the UK and the US, 80 percent of the art is sold domes-
tically. For instance, hardly any work made by two well-known American
artists, Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe, has ever been sold outside of the
United States. Moreover, their analysis shows that auction prices are deter-
mined locally. In particular, the economic growth rate and the returns on equity
in that country continue to be predictors of prices at auction sales. As a result,
differences in the return on investment in paintings persist across borders.
18
If markets were globally integrated, these differences should be leveled out

through a process of arbitrage. Moreover, Renneboog and Spaenjers do not
find that the importance of these local fundamentals has decreased as one
would expect in a globalizing market. They attribute this imperfect global
integration of art markets to persistent transaction and transportation costs
(for instance, a potential buyer of a piece of art will want to inspect it in
person before bidding on it), trade barriers (in some cases, the cross-border
sale of works of art is outlawed altogether since they are part of national
cultural heritage), and national differences in taste (think, for instance, of
l
ria
Russian and Chinese collectors buying back their country’s cultural heritage
or their prized painters on art markets in Europe and the United States).
ate
This book also provides reasons to believe, however, that the home bias is
waning. In Chapter 9 for instance, Tamar Yogev and Gokhan Ertug find that
Asian artists have become more visible globally because today more non-Asian
dM
galleries are representing Asian artists than in the past. Moreover, they show
that the distances travelled by non-Asian galleries to Asian fairs has increased.
In other words, there is evidence that the trade in art is indeed taking place
hte
over ever-greater distances. At the same time, however, Asian galleries are less
likely to travel long distances to participate in art fairs, but this can also be seen
as an effect of globalization: whereas these galleries had to travel to a European
rig
or American fair in the past, they can now go to one of the fairs which have
recently been established in Asia.
py
Moreover, in Chapter 5 Khaire discusses three attempts of Internet entre-

preneurs to establish online markets for art of different sorts. Although none
Co
has so far shown the breakthrough success common to online ventures in

other cultural industries, Khaire resists the communis opinio that the prospects
for online art markets are bleak given “the need for buyers to interact with and
w-
experience an art work and obtain informative discourse about it, to explore
whether they feel an emotional connection with it, as well as collectors’ desire
to ‘be seen’ buying art and to belong to an exclusive club of insiders.” Her
vie
analysis suggests the reasons for the slow start of online markets might be
attributed to other, more systematic causes, which allows us to understand
Pre
and propose ways and contingencies that could potentially enable online art
markets to exist and even thrive.
Khaire sees the Internet as a change agent because of its ability to improve
the quality and quantity of art discourse, or what Heinich has called the
intermediation of art (Heinich 2012), across longer distances. Moreover,
while the chances on the primary market, where the reputation of an artist
still needs to be established, are slim because reputation-building may indeed
require proximity, on the secondary market, where reputations have already
been stabilized to some extent, Khaire predicts that the Internet may in the
end initiate a “recreation” of the market’s ecosystem. In the top segment of
19
the art market that prediction seems to have already come true to some extent.
As the American art dealer Marian Boesky describes the sale of works of art to
clients who she never meets, and who buy on the basis of solely digital images
of the work: “An email comes in, and you Google the person, and it’s the 14th-
richest person in Japan or something.”9
1.7 Globalization of Art Markets has Hardly Resulted

in a Redistribution of Symbolic Power
l
ria
A final, sixth assumption in common understandings of cultural globalization
ate
is that it results in the waning dominance of Europe and the United States:
contemporary artists from Asia, Latin America, and Africa for example,
become more visible in international exhibition venues such as biennials,
dM
museums, and art centers which function as gatekeepers to the art world
and which consecrate contemporary art. Given that symbolic capital can in
the long run be converted into economic capital (Bourdieu 1993), this would
hte
also have repercussions for the art market.
The redistribution of symbolic power is supposed to be the result of two
distinct processes: first of all, it results from a global shift in the composition of
rig
the arts organizations involved in gatekeeping and consecration. As a result of

this shift, artistic reputations are no longer exclusively made by a limited
py
group of prestigious museums and art centers located in Europe and the
United States, but by a plethora of—relatively new—organizations in other
Co
regions of the world. In passing, many of the contributions to this book

mention local gatekeeping institutions such as private art foundations and
w-
residency programs as well as private collections and private museums. Espe-

cially in regions where the government is unwilling or unable to support the
contemporary art world, these organizations constitute new ways of conse-
vie
crating art. For Brazilian, Chinese, and Indian artists respectively (and in some
cases even for European or American artists), getting the opportunity to
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exhibit in former mining magnate Bernardo Paz’s prestigious and megalo-

maniacal museum Inhotim, in the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in
Beijing, established by the Belgian collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens, or in
Kirin Nadar’s Museum of Art (KNMA) in New Delhi, is a source of status.
One weakness of this assumption is, however, that in spite of a museum
building boom in countries like China or the Gulf States, the cultural infra-
structure in many of these regions is still hardly developed (see Figure 1.4).
9
Alexander Wolfe, “Marianne Boesky: In Search of Art Stars,” Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2014,
<http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303704304579380990432959088> last
accessed March 2014.
20
1400
1200
1000
800
600
400
l
200
ria
0
ge o
ate
a
a
y
ite F A
ng ce
m
ly
A n
itz tria
he d
Ca ds
da
M il
az
an
in
in
i
ut re
ric
di
Ar xic
ai
pa
et an
US
Ita
ut ss
do
n
d ran
na
Sp
Ch
nt
In
So Ko
Br
Sw us
So Ru
Af
rla
m
N erl
Ja
e
er
h
h
Ki
G
dM
Un
Figure 1.4. Number of non-profit visual arts organizations in selected countries

Source: artfacts.net
hte
rig
Compared to Europe and the United States, the number of museums, art
centers, and other public, non-profit exhibition spaces is limited. For instance,
py
whereas the website artfacts.net lists 1,317 arts organizations for Germany and
1,169 for the United States, China and India—the two most populated coun-
Co
tries of the world—have only 72 and 24 respectively. As a result, for visibility

and consecration, artists born in these countries continue to rely on Western
organizations almost by necessity. Moreover, especially a solo show in a
w-
European or American museum remains, for many artists in emerging regions,

an important symbolic achievement, signaling that they are globally seen as a
contemporary artist in their own right.
vie
A second process in which symbolic power is redistributed involves a

reorientation of established art organizations in Europe and the United States,
Pre
toward a more global, inclusive exhibition and acquisition policy: an increas-

ing number of solo and group exhibitions is devoted to artists born outside of
Europe and the United States. A key, often-cited event in this respect was the
2002 edition of the Documenta, a prestigious overview of “state of the art” of
contemporary visual art production organized every five years in the German
town of Kassel. In 2002, it was headed by the Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor,
who together with assistant curator Carlos Basualdo from Argentina sought to
“redress the past exclusions carried out by ‘Westernism’.” Frequently referred
to as the “multicultural” or “postcolonial” Documenta, Enwezor explored
“a range of social and material conditions able to restore the interaction
21
between art and politics that was itself the motivating force behind numerous
Western avant-gardes.”10 Likewise, Alain Seban, the president of Centre Pom-
pidou, claims that the globalization of the art scene “is the major concern for a
contemporary art museum in the 21st century. Art has become a global matter.
Our collection aims to be universal, so it needs to reflect this new geography in
creation by opening out to emerging scenes [ . . . ] This implies restructuring the
museum, and finding fresh means to broaden the collection.”11
Although plenty of anecdotal evidence may exist which supports this
assumption, systematic empirical research so far does not.12 The French soci-
l
ria
ologist Alain Quemin, for instance, has studied the composition in terms of
nationality of artists whose works are represented in the Fonds National d’Art
ate
Contemporain: France’s main public collection of contemporary art which
contains about 70,000 works of art. Five countries—the US, Germany, the UK,
Italy, and Switzerland—make up 60 percent of all acquisitions for the museum
dM
collections between 1991 and 2004 (Quemin 2006). Artists from emerging
countries such as Russia, China, India, or Brazil are represented with a handful
of acquisitions each. Exhibitions at major museums such as the Tate Gallery in
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New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Modern
Art in New York show similar patterns.13
The German sociologists Ulf Wuggenig and Larissa Buchholz likewise point
rig
at the continuing hegemony of a small number of Western countries. For

instance, in the Kunstkompass, an annual top 100 of artists based on reputa-
py
tion (which is measured by counting and weighing, for instance, the museum
shows an artist is invited to, and the attention devoted in art periodicals and
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books to these artists), published by the German business magazine Kapital,

artists from the United States and Europe dominate the lists persistently from
1970 until 2005. Although their share has been slightly decreasing since the
w-
mid-1990s, it never falls under 80 percent over the thirty-five-year time span.
Buchholz and Wuggenig conclude: “data reveal the blatant exclusion of East-
vie
ern Europe, Latin America, Australia as well as Africa and Asia from the centre
of the self-proclaimed, global art-world” (Buchholz and Wuggenig 2006).
Moreover, Wuggenig notes in a study of art collecting that the United States
Pre
and Europe continue to dominate ARTnews’ annual list of the world’s 200
most important collectors (Wuggenig 2011).
10
Kobena Mercer, ‘Documenta 11,’ Frieze, September 2002, n.69, <https://www.frieze.com/
issue/article/documenta_113/>
11
Interview with Alain Seban, President of the Centre Pompidou by Stéphanie Hussonnois
<http://artnews.org/pompidou/?exi=41190> last accessed September 2014.
12
We are aware that the contributors to this book are by and large natives or residents of Europe
and the United States as well, which, for the academic field, underscores the point which some
chapters in this volume make for the cultural field: for a variety of reasons, and in spite of cultural
globalization, the academic field continues to be dominated by these two regions.
13
See Hest (2012) for similar results pertaining in particular to the Netherlands.
22
An analysis conducted by cultural economists Lasse Steiner, Bruno Frey, and

Magnus Resch of the database Larryslist.com, confirm this finding for collect-
ors: of the world’s 3,119 most prominent private art collections, 63 percent are
located in North America and Europe. While Asia, by far the most populated
region of the world, performs relatively well (24 percent), Latin America and
the Middle East only host 8 and 5 percent respectively, of the private collec-
tions. Finally, a meager sixteen art collectors (0.1 percent) live in Africa
(Steiner et al. 2013).
While some of these studies may be outdated given the speed of cultural
l
ria
globalization, and while the contributions to this book suggest that the num-
ber of artists from outside Europe and the United States who gain visibility in
ate
European and American exhibition spaces is on the rise, it still does not come
close to the visibility of their “Western” counterparts. For instance, in their
Chapter 8, Alain Quemin and Femke van Hest study the nationalities of artists
dM
in three major rankings: two rankings of artists (the Kunstkompass and art-
facts.net) and one ranking of the most powerful players of the international
contemporary art world (the ArtReview Power 100). They find that the number
hte
of countries in these rankings has hardly increased, and amounts to no more
than 10 percent of all the countries in the world. Moreover, Germany and the
United States continue to dominate, representing the lion’s share of artists
rig
which appear in the rankings. Quemin and van Hest interpret their findings in
terms of a “ ‘social law’ in Durkheimian terms, unveiling a strong hierarchy
py
among countries that evolves very little over time as, once again, success
generally begets success, both individually and in national terms.”
Co
Finally, in Chapter 3, Stefano Baia Curioni, Laura Forti, and Ludovica Leone
point at the continuing importance of Art Basel as a gatekeeper in the global
art market, and use the interaction between galleries (480) and the artists that
w-
have been exhibited from 2005 to 2012 (6,889 unique artists) in order to
develop a metric of the artists’ centrality and its recent dynamics in the global
vie
system. Although more galleries from peripheral regions manage to get

selected for Art Basel and more artists from those regions are exhibited at the
fair, the central position of the system continues to be occupied by galleries
Pre
and artists from Europe and the United States. However, times seem to be
changing. Using network analysis, Baia Curioni, Forti, and Leone argue that
the centrality of artists from all peripheral regions is rising, albeit in historic-
ally differentiated ways, as the case of Brazil, India, and China indicate.
1.8 Conclusion
This volume studies the ways in which art markets have emerged across the
globe, the extent to which cross-border flows of art have developed, the ways in
23
which globalization has or has not had an impact on local art markets, and the
extent to which art market infrastructures have spread from Europe and the
United States to other regions of the world. The ambitions of this book, however,
are more encompassing than to describe, analyze, and understand the global-
ization of art markets on the basis of both qualitative and quantitative empirical
data; they go beyond a mere critique and reassessment, outlined in this chapter,
of the current celebratory discourse on the globalization of art markets.
First of all, the book also seeks to reorient the academic debate and media
attention on art markets, by focusing on the market in its full breadth, rather
l
ria
than just the top segment of the global art market where the art of superstar
artists is exhibited in a select number of the most consecrated spaces, pro-
ate
moted by a small number of powerhouse dealers such as Gagosian, David
Zwirner, White Cube or Hauser & Wirth, and sold for multimillion dollar
prices at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. The chapters suggest that some countries
dM
such as Japan have by and large failed to get integrated into a global frame-
work, and that local actors may have benefited from that failure. They give an
insight into the lived experience of young, unknown artists who start their
hte
careers in post-boom markets with few possibilities to sell and exhibit their
work. They show that in some countries traditional, governmental institu-
tions continue to play a role in the career trajectories of artists. Moreover, in
rig
quantitative terms the chapters show that the extent to which the art market
is globalized, however that term may be defined and operationalized, heavily
py
depends on the market segment that is focused on.

Second, the book contributes to wider debates in social sciences on how
Co
markets emerge, both locally and globally. Markets for art do not emerge
spontaneously, as soon as demand and supply for art exist in a region. Neither
is it a matter of conscious design, i.e. the introduction of a legal framework
w-
governing art’s commercial exchange. It shows that market emergence is a

complex, multifaceted process, which is embedded in the wider emergence of
vie
art worlds around the globe. It is therefore no coincidence that the rise of the
art fair and the (non-commercial) art biennial go hand in hand. Jointly, the
chapters argue that it takes both individual and collective efforts of many
Pre
different sorts to “make” markets where previously they did not exist or were
not institutionalized. These efforts include: the creation of new, and the
diffusion of old, institutions and organizations engaged in the valorization
or consecration of art; the development of individual interests and subjectiv-
ities, both among artists, collectors, and intermediaries which enable them to
recognize contemporary art as a source of status, inspiration, profit, or finan-
cial return; the invention of new market devices such as electronic trading
platforms and auction price databases which enable cross-border flows of art;
the adjustment of specific power configurations which allow for the entry and
exit of new, both local and foreign, actors to the market; the creation of
24
different sorts of informal norms and routines which coordinate the actions of
market actors and which render mutual behavior understandable.
Mostly the processes of market making are self-governed by the private
actors and organizations involved (cf. Aspers 2011: 160–2). States, however,
are not impartial to them (cf. Fligstein 2002). At times they have enabled the
emergence of art markets, for instance by contributing to the development of
a cultural infrastructure or by backing up status hierarchies within them. At
other times however, they have hindered these processes, for instance by
leaving trade barriers of different sorts in place.
l
ria
Third, the book contributes to wider debates about cultural globalization.
A key finding in this respect is that patterns of globalization, according to one
ate
of the three understandings of the term that we distinguished at the begin-
ning of this introduction, may not coincide with patterns according to the
other two understandings. In particular, this book shows that in spite of the
dM
fact that markets for contemporary art have emerged across the globe, in spite
of the fact that the very idea of contemporary art has been embraced in
communities who were until twenty years ago oblivious of it, and in spite of
hte
the fact that actors in these emerging art markets have to some extent adopted
blueprints for the trade in art, cross-border flows of art and artists have
remained comparatively insignificant. In other words, whereas blueprints
rig
and models for the organization of art markets travel rather easily, this is not
necessarily the case for the very art that is traded by means of these blueprints
py
and models. Instead, some segments of art markets continue to operate locally
or regionally, just like regional markets for television programs and movies
Co
developed after a first wave of globalization (read: Americanization) in the

1970s and 1980s (cf. Sinclair et al. 1996). A single, unified, integrated global
market for contemporary art is not in sight.
w-
Finally, the goal of this book is to open up new avenues of research. For
instance, our understanding of what motivates buyers of contemporary art
vie
and how this may differ around the globe is still limited. Likewise, systematic
research is needed into the barriers to cross-border art trade: how big is the
impact of tariffs and custom regulations, to what extent do geographical taste
Pre
patterns play a role, and how strong is the need for—real or virtual—proximity
between market actors? What explains the continuing dominance of Europe
and the United States in the global art market, manifested for instance at art
fairs such as Art Basel, in artists’ rankings, or in the composition of private art
collections? Can new rankings be produced which, now and in the future, do
better justice to new, globally dispersed sources of legitimacy and different
gatekeeping systems? In short, the key reason to put this book together was
that little systematic research on the globalization of art markets exists.
Although we hope to have filled part of this gap, new research is warranted
to fill all of it.
25
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Making Markets Global

Olav Velthuis and Stefano Baia Curioni

circulates in a speciﬁc organizational framework of contemporary art

the auctioneers, collectors frequently new to the market, from dozens of

Making Markets Global

The book takes a multidisciplinary approach, and includes studies by econo-

standing of one another’s theoretical frameworks, and conceptual confusion

semic, contested, and contentious terms in contemporary social science

single, shared deﬁnition of globalization. Instead, we alternate between three

ment of institutional frameworks and organizational infrastructures which

Olav Velthuis and Stefano Baia Curioni

on local artists are looked down upon as parochial.

Making Markets Global

1.2 Globalization of Art Markets is not New dM

system into a global inclusive system.4 Curator Jean-Hubert Martin selected

an art world in which “one hundred percent of exhibitions” ignore “80

Olav Velthuis and Stefano Baia Curioni

Instead of seeing the globalization of contemporary art markets as a new

reincarnations of nineteenth-century ﬁgures like J. P. Morgan or Henry Frick,

French impressionists in large quantities.

inspired by Japanese prints, Picasso by “primitive” African art, and Gauguin

and postcolonial—between African artists and their Western counterparts

Making Markets Global

In short, instead of representing the globalization of art markets as a recent,

Although the current wave—which is characterized among others by the

contemporary situation cannot be fully understood without considering its

1.3 Globalization of Art Markets Does not Just

A second assumption in current accounts of the globalization of contempor-

Olav Velthuis and Stefano Baia Curioni

government property which, in countries like Russia, was executed in a wild,

elite of super-rich citizens. According to Forbes, the number of billionaires in

It is the mechanistic nature of the relationship between economic and

Reuters October 15, 2013 <http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/15/us-art-market-sales-

Making Markets Global

diversiﬁcation of available commodities, along with a burgeoning middle class

regarding the extent to which art constitutes a good investment, offering

Olav Velthuis and Stefano Baia Curioni

speculative investment more generally, many of these exchanges turned out

international art capitals.

Making Markets Global

1.4 Globalization of Art Markets is Not a Teleological Process

A third, related assumption in the dominant discourse on globalization of art

example—they don’t usually go back.”7

Olav Velthuis and Stefano Baia Curioni

interests which are threatened by globalization, may be a source of resistance.

international curators never got a strong foothold in Japan (Chapter 11).

of contemporary art: partially because they are able to physically connect

produced in one region to audiences in other regions (cf. Heinich 2012;

ence are intensely competitive and dominated by parochialism. ( . . . ) Modern

Making Markets Global

achieved near-mythical status due to his visionary and relentless projection of

1.5 Globalization of Art Markets Cannot Be Equated

If the globalization of art markets is seen as a teleological process, its telos is

frequently assumed to be an art market which is organized using European/