The market and museums: the increasing power of collectors and private galleries in the contemporary art world

ABSTRACT

This article reveals different ways in which actors in the art market – both prominent collectors and high end galleries – manage to intervene in museum institutions’ choices and, thus, strengthen their weight in the creation of art value. While in the 1960s and 1990s, the French sociologist Raymonde Moulin argued that the value of art is constituted at the junction of the market and the museum, but tended towards the pre-eminence of institutions, the market has considerably strengthened its role in the creation of artistic value since that time. The example of the French case, central in this article, illustrates a development where leading collectors – Bernard Arnault, CEO of the luxury group LVMH and François Pinault, CEO of the Kering group and owner of the auction house Christie’s – compete with museums through the institutions that they control and can influence the choices of public institutions. A similar trend is examined in the context of high end galleries which now have the financial means and personnel to offer exhibitions capable of competing with museums.

KEYWORDS:

• Art market
• collectors
• contemporary art
• galleries
• museums
• rankings

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Kathryn Brown for her precious collaboration in elaborating the final version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Alain Quemin is an exceptional class professor of sociology of art at Université Paris-8 and a Senior Member of Institut Universitaire de France.

Notes

1 In the case of multiple positions in the art world, I only considered the main or first one of all players to categorize them here. For instance, François Pinault was classified as a collector, although he owns museums and an auction house. But his first activity in the art world was collecting and he is still a major collector.

2 Other groups of actors were as follows: curators (14.4%), museum directors (8.0%), critics (4.2%), auction house leaders, art fair directors or architects (1.7% each), other (2.5%).

3 The category comprising curators, museum directors and critics weighed for 25.3% (againts 26.6% previously), art fair directors 2.7%, ‘thinkers and theoretists’ 7.3% and various other functions 1.3%.

4 The share of curators, museum directors and critics remains unaffected (25%) but it comprises 3 different sub-groups that are at least partly distinct. The share of art fair directors is 5%. Artists only account for 12%, which is a sign that their power in the art world tended to be overestimated previously. No ‘thinker’ is represented during the whole period, which tends to show that the influence of that group is also largely overestimated by ArtReview.

5 Among his multiple functions in the art world, being a collector is the first one that is mentioned by ArtReview. The same will be seen for François Pinault.

6 As a matter of fact, for a very brief moment, he even was the richest person in the world in 2019.

7 As mentioned above, as given the strong variations in the Power 100, individual cases have to be considered very cautiously and are just mentioned here as a general indication.

8 Similar examples can be found around the world as contemporary art galleries tend to concentrate around prominent art institutions. In Madrid, around the Reina Sophia museum; in Shanghaï, international galleries like Lisson, Perrotin and Almine Rech are installed on Huqiu Road also named ‘Museum Road’, a few meters away from Christie’s and from the Rockbund Art Museum.

9 Julia Halperin, ‘Almost one third of solo shows in US museums go to artists represented by five galleries’, The Art Newspaper, April 2, 2015. 590 solo show exhibitions of contemporary artists were considered, organized in 68 museums between 2007 and 2013, focusing on their main exhibitions.