Art markets, epistemic authority, and the institutional curation of knowledge

ABSTRACT

The recent proliferation of data about art prices has been interpreted as the democratization of a formerly secretive economic sphere. Contesting this idea, I argue that such data is collected, controlled, and disseminated by international art dealers and auction houses for the purpose of reinforcing the myth of a single, integrated market for art. Through the analysis of presentation strategies in Gagosian Gallery’s online viewing rooms and Sotheby’s Mei Moses Index, I argue that dominant art world institutions use art history and price data to support the speculative value of artworks and to perpetuate knowledge asymmetries that reinforce their own epistemic authority. I debate whether Friedrich Hayek’s conception of price as an unbiased aggregator of dispersed information is a useful way of conceptualizing speculative value in the art world. I conclude that, in contrast to Hayek’s ideas, contemporary art market data is given the illusion of democratic dispersal while remaining within the purview of dominant institutions. The curation of knowledge involved in this process exacerbates art world inequality and risks sidelining the heterogeneous creative practices that populate a broad range of creative spheres.

KEYWORDS:

• Art market
• canon
• epistemology
• Hayek
• power
• speculative value

The aim of this article is to examine how international art dealerships and auction houses curate knowledge about the market for contemporary art to support the speculative value of artworks. I will argue that the activities of these institutions extend beyond the mere provision and management of market data for the benefit of buyers and sellers of art. Rather, through their marshalling of information from the fields of art history and economics, dealers and auction houses shape cultural ideas about aesthetic value and craft an image of the art market that reinforces their own epistemic, and ultimately, financial power. I will make the case that the ways in which information is generated and used undermines the democratic potential of data availability, entrenches inequality between artists, and promotes types of art that fall within the selective parameters of the international art trade. I will move debates about the function of market intelligence beyond considerations of art world financialization and will examine the relevance of ‘datafication’ to wider conceptions of cultural value. The discussion offers insight into the functioning of art markets, but also has implications for processes of canon formation and institutional display practices.

The opening decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a significant increase in the production and circulation of data about art markets. This information covers prices realized by artworks, predictions about artists’ careers, market indicators based on sales at auctions and art fairs, and assessments of the degree of power wielded by different players in the global art world. Information about these topics is accessible both in print and online, and much of it is free. Each of ArtTactic, Artprice, and Art Basel (with UBS) publish annual art market reports and special studies; the Mei Moses Art Index (acquired by Sotheby’s in 2016) offers information on repeat auction sales for selected artefacts; the Power 100 published by ArtReview purports to list the most influential individuals in the artworld on an annual basis; and numerous rankings, including the famous Kunstkompass created by Willi Bongard (1931–1985) in the 1970s and the more recent Artfacts.net, aim to chart the rising or falling reputations of individual artists.¹

Accompanying this data surge, specialist firms such as the Blouin Art Sales Index provide collectors with bespoke advice on valuations and market developments. The web-based Artsy offers promotional opportunities for art institutions as well as online art fair previews and advice for individuals. In a further extension of this trend, market data is often integrated into exhibitions hosted by gallerists and auction houses – a step that posits prices themselves objects of appreciation.

Taken together, these increases in the availability of information appear to represent the democratization of an historically secretive industry. As Hans J. van Miegroet, Kaylee P. Alexander and Fiene Leunissen (2019, p. 3) have pointed out, however, there remains a lack of transparency in the collection and preparation of this information, including in many cases a failure to disclose underlying raw data. Their analysis sounds a cautionary note about the reliability of findings presented in the numerous reports and databases that comprise the art finance landscape.

For some scholars, prices – and the data produced about them – are themselves ‘cultural entities’ that circulate within social networks and illuminate a variety of interactions and rituals (Velthuis 2005, Adkins and Lehtonen 2018). These prices are, it is argued, as much a part of the cultural landscape as the works to which they attach. For other commentators, the proliferation of price data is closely connected to the financialization of art and its constitution as an asset class (Horowitz 2014, Haiven 2018, Upton-Hansen 2018, Brown 2020). For Max Haiven (2018) the proximity of art and capitalism does not simply result in a system that promotes competition between dominant financial players, but rather creates a ‘financialized imagination’ among wider participants in the art world. This is, he argues, a condition in which the logic of the market reshapes ‘the fields of daily life and sociality’ and makes cultural objects part of a largely ‘speculative order’ (Haiven 2018, p. 8). Indeed, as I have argued in a different context, the increasing focus on economic narratives of art risks prioritizing histories of capital that deflect interest from the intrinsic qualities of art objects themselves (Brown 2020).

I will begin by considering ideas about the dispersal and concentration of knowledge in markets as discussed by the Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek in his famous essay of 1945 ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’. I have chosen this starting point on the grounds that Hayek defends a conception of price as an unbiased aggregator of dispersed information. This idea offers a model for understanding how price can function in a potentially democratic way: data is elicited from diverse sources for the purpose of generating a public and systemic signal about the value of objects. I test the applicability of Hayek’s model in the art world by examining the epistemic resources that are, in fact, typically used to underpin the attribution of price in this sector. Developing Aeron Davis’s conception of ‘speculative value’ as ‘an estimation of future economic exchange value over and above the present’ (2018, p. 10), I focus on strategies employed by art dealers and auction houses to promote artworks. Estimates of the future economic value of an artwork are, I will argue, derived primarily from fictions that combine narratives of artistic influence with selective information about historical sales prices attaching to particular classes of artefact. These fictions – produced and controlled by a small cadre of individuals and institutions – reinforce a conservative notion of the Western art canon and become part of a self-reinforcing logic that entangles the speculative and aesthetic values of art objects. I will argue that, ultimately, Hayek’s conception of price does not to apply to the art world despite the apparently widespread availability of data that appears to underpin the sector’s mechanisms of value creation.

The argument of this article will defend the idea that information is carefully curated by dealers and auction houses for purposes that extend beyond convincing buyers of the speculative value attaching to particular artworks. I will make the case that art world professionals combine art historical and financial information to support and legitimate the myth that there exists a single, integrated global art market in which they play the role of expert. This reinforces artworld inequality by undermining informational transparency, reducing epistemic diversity, and identifying a restricted number of artists as producers of ‘collectable’ works. While the discussion focuses on aspects of the contemporary art market, it has significance for wider areas of cultural production that are informed by conceptions of the future financial, social, and aesthetic values that may be said to attach to particular artefacts.

Information and knowledge

In 1945 Hayek published an influential essay about the creation of a rational economic order: ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’. In an argument against the need for a centralized planning authority to manage the economic system of any given society, he pointed to the price system as a means by which private pieces of knowledge combine to bring about informational – and hence economic – consensus on commodities. For Hayek, prices play an important role as aggregators of information because ‘the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use [to achieve a rational economic order] never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess’ (Hayek 1945, p. 5). This forms part of his critique of centrally planned command socialism. In this account, the sharing of different informational resources creates an efficient market because no single authority possesses all of the relevant knowledge that could allow it to exert total economic control. Such a market avoids informational asymmetries that would, if allowed to develop, generate concentrations of power in the hands of those who hold the highest proportion of epistemic resources. Underpinning the construction of a rational economic order is, for Hayek, the question of how best to acquire and use knowledge that is ‘not given to anyone in its totality’ (1945, p. 5).

While Hayek focuses on the relationship between pricing and knowledge dissemination in socio-economic orders, he hints at the broader cultural significance of his discussion:

The problem which we meet here is by no means peculiar to economics but arises in connection with nearly all truly social phenomena, with language and with most of our cultural inheritance, and constitutes really the central theoretical problem of all social science. (1945, p. 15)

It is this extension of Hayek’s argument that I seek to develop and test in this article by examining the production and control of information in contemporary art markets. Just as prices consolidate and ultimately reflect information drawn from a range of private sources, so too individuals rely on similar heuristics – or aggregators of information – for the purpose of functioning quickly and efficiently in other spheres. As Hayek puts it, this includes the use of ‘formulas, symbols, and rules whose meaning we do not understand’ and that are derived from the knowledge that no individual possesses in its entirety (Hayek 1945, p. 15). While this may seem uncontentious or, indeed, necessary for the functioning of society, there is a worrying point in the concluding part of Hayek’s discussion: ‘We have developed these practices and institutions by building upon habits and institutions which have proved successful in their own sphere and which have in turn become the foundation of the civilization we have built up’ (1945, p. 15). This raises questions about the validity of sources of information – particularly across different socio-cultural spheres – and the authority with which information is given and accepted. In the following discussion, I am concerned with how conceptions of the values attaching to art are driven by the practices of institutions which, in Hayek’s terms, ‘have proved successful in their sphere’ – in this case, that of finance. This raises issues of epistemic power that are not fully elaborated in Hayek’s discussion.

Elias Khalil (2002) has debated the meaning of ‘knowledge’ in Hayek’s essay and argues for a more nuanced terminology. Khalil understands ‘information’ as ‘data that is objective, but […] too dispersed for a single mind to command’ (2002, p. 324). In his account, this includes information about quantities and costs that can be more or less known with the assistance of probability distribution functions. He contrasts this with ‘knowledge’ as ‘the subjective, creative aspect of human comprehension of the world’ (Khalil 2002, p. 324). In Khalil’s view, Hayek uses the term ‘knowledge’ to cover both of these points while also insisting that ‘knowledge is not an objective fact, but is rather created as agents use their imagination while acting purposefully’ (Khalil 2002, p. 321). Those actions are not necessarily undertaken in a market context, but can structure and support wider beliefs and activities.²

Khalil acknowledges that objections may be raised to this dichotomy between ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’ (2002, p. 324) on grounds that the terms are not wholly disjunctive. In the case with which I am concerned, it could be argued that a piece of ‘information’ about the price at which an artwork is sold constitutes a piece of ‘knowledge’ about the biography of that artefact. My reason for pursuing a distinction between the two terms is to consider how the deliberate collation, organization, and presentation of information – its ‘curation’ – as knowledge shapes particular artworld values. This process involves the exertion of epistemic power. While fragments of data may be dispersed throughout a society and may even be useless when concentrated in the hands of a particular individual or group, it is the transformation of data into knowledge about the world that reveals as much about structures of social organization as it does about the ultimate object of that knowledge. While Hayek conceived of the dispersal of information among individuals and institutions as a means of pre-empting concentrations of power, I am interested in the process by which contemporary art world data is given the illusion of democratic dispersal while remaining within the control of dominant institutions.

Miranda Fricker’s discussion of the relationship between identity power and social power is relevant to this issue, as an important part of such knowledge production derives from presumptions about the authority of the individual (or entity) who makes utterances that are accepted by a wider community. As Fricker puts it: ‘Whenever there is an operation of power that depends in some significant degree upon […] shared imaginative conceptions of social identity, then identity power is at work’ (2007, p. 10). The role of identity power is important in Fricker’s analysis because it is determined by stereotypes that help to shape ‘spontaneous assessments’ about the credibility of a speaker (2007, p. 17). This raises issues about the criteria used to determine the trustworthiness of particular individuals or institutions and is relevant to the ways in which knowledge is produced and shared within art worlds.

As mentioned above, a wealth of information about artists, artworks, and prices flows through the data conduits of the contemporary art world. More interesting – and, indeed, more important – are the mechanisms by which this information is used to endorse particular artists, determine trends, and influence buyers. As Adkins and Lehtohnen have argued, questions of price raise important issues about ‘incipient forms of inequality, the dynamics and character of public authority, the speculative movements of finance and the relationship of the present to the future’ (2018, 110). Connecting these social features of price to the exercise of identity power discussed by Fricker, I am interested in the epistemic resources that are used to determine the speculative value of art objects and what the use of these resources reveals about the power structures of the contemporary art world. In contrast to Hayek’s view that price is an unbiased aggregator of information, the circulation and use of data about art is closely connected to the cultural authority of the relevant speaker. In this context, therefore, the democratic potential of ‘objective’ price information is undermined.

Olav Velthuis and Erica Coslor have traced the rise of different art indices from the 1960s to the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, noting that the dissemination of art market information both reduced ‘the importance of insider knowledge and information retrieved in personal networks’ and aimed to make disparate artworks ‘comparable and commensurable’ (2012, p. 477 and 483). At face value, their findings seem to suggest a dispersal of information that has a democratizing effect on the art market. Yet Velthuis and Coslor also note that this data proliferation has by no means obviated the ongoing role of privileged or inside information within the art market (e.g. knowledge of a museum’s plans for an artist’s retrospective). Nor has it resulted in the creation of ‘shared, stable standards of value’ (2012, p. 481). Despite increases in the amount of art market data in circulation, Velthuis and Coslor conclude that there is a failure to convert ‘the idiosyncratic, personalized knowledge of individual market actors regarding specific works of art into generalized impersonal knowledge’ (2012, p. 481). The epistemic practices with which I am concerned in this article deepen this failure.

Velthuis and Coslor’s conclusion reflects a tension that runs throughout art market debates. On the one hand, the circulation of information suggests the existence of objective data on which to make assumptions about the value of artists and their works. On the other hand, the need for interpretation of that data – its curation as knowledge – rests on the activities of a network comprising dealers, curators, and auction house professionals. The result is the maintenance of a knowledge asymmetry that operates to the benefit of art world professionals.

In her pioneering work on art markets, Raymonde Moulin discussed the existence of informational asymmetries based on collusion and covert complicity between cultural and economic actors (1995, p. 39). While the persistence of knowledge asymmetries in a field that has evolved from elitist systems of connoisseurship may not be surprising, I am less concerned with the impact of insider information (which could arise in any market) than with the strategic mobilization of epistemic resources in a context of unprecedented data proliferation. In this process, subjective associations are transformed into supposedly objective fact, and the illusion is generated that the resulting knowledge is supported by a broader epistemic community.

In the following two sections, I will examine these issues through the examples of Gagosian Gallery’s online viewing rooms and the Mei Moses Index. My reason for focusing on Gagosian is that it is one of the largest international galleries, with locations in major financial centres around the world, online sales platforms, and a presence at established art fairs. Occupying a comparably significant role in the realm of art market evaluations, the Mei Moses Index has been described as one of several ‘reliable, independent measures of underlying performance based on the hard empirical evidence provided by large numbers of open market transactions’ (Eckstein 2008, p. 71). Using these examples, I will argue that the epistemic infrastructure created to support the upper end of the international art market does not sit outside that market for the purpose of observing and commenting on it. Rather, it actively ‘performs, shapes and formats’ (Callon 1998, p. 2) the market by creating an art world that is built on the logic of speculative value.

Epistemic authority and the Western art canon

As part of the 2020 Frieze Art Fair in New York, the Gagosian Gallery created an online viewing room for a work by one of the artists it represents: the British painter Cecily Brown (b. 1969). Gagosian had pioneered the use of online viewing rooms at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2019 with a show devoted to a single painting (Abstract, 1988) by the German artist, Albert Oehlen. Building on the success of the launch, this virtual exhibition of Brown’s work was positioned at the cutting-edge of financial and cultural innovation:

With extensive original content and record-setting sales, the Online Viewing Room has made its mark as a platform with unprecedented visibility for artists and collectors alike. In anticipation of Brown’s major exhibition of new paintings at Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, England, and as demand for her works reaches new heights, this timely offering is a rare chance to acquire one of the most celebrated and exhibited paintings from this formative period. (Gagosian 2020a, np)

The viewing room contained high-resolution images of Brown’s painting and short promotional videos by industry experts. In a segment produced for the virtual encounter, Gagosian director Deborah McLeod discussed Brown’s career and gave insight into the work on sale, Figures in a Landscape 1 from 2001 (Gagosian 2020b).

Of interest for the purposes of the present discussion is the way in which McLeod embedded the painting in a twinned economic and art historical narrative. Three primary strategies came to the fore. First, McLeod emphasized the museum quality of Brown’s works and identified institutions that had acquired paintings from this period of the artist’s career: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Tate, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Rubell Collection, and The Broad. No distinction was drawn between public and private museum collecting. Nor was mention made of the fact that Gagosian had historically enjoyed a close relationship with Eli Broad and had worked with the late collector-turned-museum owner on the acquisition of numerous artworks.

In keeping with the emphasis on museum endorsement, the second tactic was to place Brown’s creativity in relation to the Western art canon. This consisted in discerning various influences on her work, including the impact on her pictorial imagination of works by Titian, Francisco Goya y Lucientes, Edgar Degas, Arshile Gorky, Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon. If female artists typically underperform in the market as their careers develop (McAndrew 2020, p. 104), McLeod deflected this problem by positioning Brown as the culmination of a history of modernist art production by European men. This implies that Brown’s work will come to be understood as part of an established narrative of Anglo-European art and that buying the painting on display is akin to buying a piece of history. Whereas avant-garde art is typically understood as representing a radical break with aesthetic tradition, here creative innovation is made intelligible – and risk free – by virtue of its relationship to the past.

The stamp of museum authority was complemented by a video featuring John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Distinguished Curator and Lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum. Elderfield joined the Gagosian team as a consultant for special projects in 2012. Since then he has written extensively for the gallery’s publication, Gagosian Quarterly, contributed information to online viewing rooms, and curated ‘museum-style exhibitions’ for the gallery (Miller 2012, Hook 2017, pp. 257–258).

Alain Quemin (2020) has noted the increasing trend for museum professionals to move into the private sector. Describing this as one of several important ways in which private art businesses take advantage of public resources, Quemin points out that the ‘more recognized for their competence the professionals were during their career as curators and/or museum directors, the more attractive they are to the market’ in terms of both their symbolic and social capital (2020, p. 218). Lending credence to Fricker’s discussion of the persuasive role of identity power in epistemic communities, Elderfield’s prior, long-standing connection to one of the major museums of modern and contemporary art in the US was leveraged for the purposes of reinforcing the art historical narrative in which Brown’s work was placed. If, as Moulin (1995, p. 48) argues, the combined forces of curator and dealer operate to secure the reputation of a contemporary artist, bringing curatorial expertise within the business operation of an art dealership strengthens the epistemic authority of the commercial institution.

Forging a connection between a contemporary artist and the canon of Western art history was not merely a tactic for establishing the aesthetic quality of Brown’s painting. Rather, it served a further specific – and arguably more important – purpose: history was used to guarantee a connection between aesthetic and speculative value. As Bruce J. Altshuler has noted, the traditional view of the museum is that it preserves and displays works that have ‘withstood the test of time’ (2005, p. 1). Adopting this measure as a sign of the aesthetic quality of a piece of contemporary art is, however, problematic as the work has not yet had an opportunity to be judged against such a test. In consequence, singling out a work of contemporary art for its museum-worthiness necessitates identifying its potential role in ‘an anticipated history’ (2005, p. 2). Altshuler rightly notes the art market analogy with this premise and foreshadows Davis’s notion of speculative value. As Altshuler argues: ‘putting a price on a recent work of art in part is to place a bet on how important this work will be in the art historical future’ (2005, p. 2).

Ethan Wagner and Thea Westrich Wagner point out the success of this logic among contemporary collectors, noting that price has become increasingly accepted as a marker of aesthetic quality and future worth:

in the past collectors largely bought art in the belief (perhaps just the hope) that their acquisitions would, at some point in the future, become important to art history, and that with such recognition the works might also increase in financial value. Today, however, there is a prevalent belief among many art collectors that when an artist’s prices increase substantially that development alone – ipso facto – indicates the artist’s historical importance. Essentially, the value markers have been reversed. (2013, pp. 79–83)

While a single set of ideas about aesthetic value is neither desirable nor feasible, the priority accorded to speculative value in this narrative is problematic. If, as the above quotation suggests, the ‘value markers have been reversed’, power attaching to the ability to set and support price becomes the driver of both the art market and of wider ideas about the cultural importance of specific objects. This undermines the logic underpinning Hayek’s notion of the productive role of price. As Richard Bronk notes in a different context, ‘market participants have come to believe […] that the information gleaned from prices is sufficient for wisdom – a view Hayek never shared’ (2013, p. 101).

In some respects Gagosian’s use of history to support speculative value is not new. As Moulin (1995) points out, the sales pitch of celebrated New York art dealer Leo Castelli (1907–1999) also depended significantly on connecting then contemporary artists (Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella) to historical counterparts including Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso (Moulin 1995, p. 42). Gagosian’s presentation of Brown’s painting moved, however, beyond artistic influence to posit the record-breaking prices of works by De Kooning and Bacon as the basis for making predictions about the future value of Brown’s art. As McLeod put it: ‘Cecily Brown can claim much of the same territory and trajectory [as De Kooning and Bacon]. While Brown has achieved this new level of high prices in the last three years, one can absolutely project with confidence that it is still early on in the ascent of her market’ (Gagosian 2020b). In this case, therefore, the prices achieved by stylistically similar artists across generations cemented a connection between aesthetic and speculative value.³

I have singled out three strategies used in Gagosian’s online viewing room for curating knowledge in support of speculative value: conceptions of museum-worthiness; relationships to canonical works of art history; and price comparisons between stylistically similar artists from different historical periods. This strategy has wider cultural implications. One thing it makes clear is that the market has a vested interest in maintaining art historical canons for the purpose of propping up speculative value. At a time when scholars, artists, and activists are challenging socio-cultural biases that support canon formation, the market not only makes one version of art history an authoritative version of aesthetic excellence, but deliberately seeks to extend the presumptions that underpin that view.⁴

Far from aggregating dispersed pieces of information in a Hayekian sense, the determination of price discussed above is characterized by an absence of cognitive diversity. It is not merely the case that price is used to guarantee aesthetic value, but that the narrative supporting price is determined by a small number of institutions and individuals. As Richard Bronk has noted, reliance on a single dominant narrative leads to ‘cognitive myopia’ (2013, p. 96) that operates in counterfashion to the ‘decentralised cognition that Hayek believed to be the main epistemic advantage of the price system’ (2013, p. 95). The kind of story-telling that supports speculative value in the contemporary artworld functions, I am arguing, as an exogenous market factor that assumes the kind of distorting function that Hayek attributed to command socialism.

Cecily Brown’s Figures in a Landscape I sold for $5.5 million, a sum that was, according to a report published by Artsy, the ‘second-highest price ever paid publicly for one of Brown’s works’ (Kamp 2020). Fulfilling its aim of curating knowledge to evidence and support both the speculative value of the painting and its future art historical relevance, Gagosian placed Brown’s painting within a carefully constructed narrative that drew upon pieces of data that seemed to be dispersed, but that were, in fact, within the purview of the Gallery. If, as John Elderfield commented upon joining Gagosian, ‘the worlds of museums and galleries keep getting closer and closer’ (Miller 2012), the result is the curation of knowledge about art that is derived from concentrations of epistemic authority in the hands of key market makers.

Price indices and performativity

Like many other sales fora, Gagosian’s online viewing room noted previous returns on the sale of works by selected artists and made this information a key element in building the speculative value of the asset on show. As noted at the beginning of this article, there are many price databases that track the financial value of artworks, but one of the best known is the Mei Moses index. Developed by Jianping Mei and Michael Moses, the eponymous index tracks repeat auction sales of individual objects over time.

The Mei Moses index has become one of the most prominent information sources in the market and was acquired by Sotheby’s in 2016. The auction house describes it as ‘objective market analysis’ and ‘the preeminent measure of the state of the art market’ (Sotheby’s 2020). Yet, as commentators have pointed out (Renneboog and Spaenjers 2013, p. 37, Wang and Zheng 2018, p. 2), the Mei Moses Index has a significant selection bias in that it only tracks works that have been sold more than once (a ‘repeat sale’) and it focuses only on auction sales (historically, this has excluded online sales).⁵ According to the Art Basel and UBS 2020 Art Market Report, in 2019 ‘sales in the auction sector (including both public auction sales and private sales by auction houses, both online and offline) made up 42% of the market’ (McAndrew 2020, p. 32).⁶ The Mei Moses represents only a sub-section of that percentage as it does not track private sales by auction houses. It is difficult, therefore, to substantiate the claim that it is the ‘preeminent measure of the state of the art market’ as a whole.

There are further limitations on the deductions that can be made from the Index. As Noah Horowitz has pointed out, not only does it omit dealer and private party sales, but it also fails to take into account the impact of damage or deterioration on a particular artefact and is biased towards works that are suited to the auction environment (2014, p. 166). I would add that it is also difficult to determine what is meant by ‘auction house sales’ in this context. In their original methodology, Mei and Moses populated their database with information on repeat sales of paintings at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York between 1925 and 2004. If, however, a work ‘had listed in its provenance a prior consummated public sale at any auction house anywhere, we went back to that auction catalogue and recorded the sale price’ (Mei and Moses 2005, p. 1). The extent to which the methodology of data collection has changed since the original incarnation of the index is unclear. Finally, as Mei and Moses themselves pointed out in 2005, works may not sell at auction for reasons that are more relevant to the concerns of the seller than to the state of the market:

It is worth noting that our database includes only those paintings that were sold during the auctions. But just because an object does not sell does not mean that it would have realized a poor or inferior return. All it means is that the owner was not satisfied with the return and chose to hold the object until it would transact at a level that would satisfy return expectations. (Mei and Moses 2005, p. 2)

One question that arises is the extent to which this kind of data (including information used to support the existence of trends or the pricing of individual art works) might shape perceptions of the market and engineer future developments. This is an issue that has been examined from a broader perspective by Donald MacKenzie (2008). Defending the idea that economic models have a performative function, MacKenzie debates the possibility that ‘economic processes or their outcomes are altered so that they better correspond to the model’ (2008, p. 19). He considers the analogy of self-validating feedback looks examined by Barry Barnes (1983) and Robert K. Merton’s notion of self-fulfilling prophecies (1948), but takes his discussion beyond the realm of beliefs and world views explored in these two approaches.⁷ Instead, he argues for a stronger version of performativity by suggesting that economic models have the power to influence outcomes ‘even if those who use them are skeptical of the model’s virtues, unaware of its details, or even ignorant of its very existence’ (MacKenzie 2008, p. 19).

The notion of performativity explored by MacKenzie (2008) and others (Bronk 2013, Callon 2017) can be developed for the purposes of enquiring into the speculative logic of the contemporary art world: what appears to be a dispersal of information in a Hayekian sense is, instead, a concentration of epistemic resources that both supports claims about prices and seeks to create a future that accords with its own, putatively independent, economic modelling. To take one example, in an article published in 2019 by Art Agency, Partners (an art consultancy firm acquired by Sotheby’s in the same year in which the latter acquired the Mei Moses Index), Michael Klein noted improvements in the market for female artists on the basis of trends in the Mei Moses Index:

The All Art-Female (AAF) index, which is comprised of 2,472 repeat sales by 499 female artists, increased by 72.9% between 2012 and 2018. Essentially, this means that a work by a female artist bought in 2012 would, on average, be worth 72.9% more if sold in 2018. In contrast, the All Art-Male (AAM) index (which comprises 55,706 repeat sales by 8,477 male artists) increased by 8.3% over that same period—65% less than the AAF index. This is in contrast to the previous 50 years in which the resale markets for both male and female artists performed roughly in parallel (albeit at different volumes). (Klein 2019)

The article makes clear that these comments relate only to the small segment of the auction market that covers repeat sales and that this growth is ‘at odds with the broader market’ (Klein 2019). Nevertheless, the uplift on investment in art by contemporary female artists between 2012 and 2018 looks dramatic at 72.9% when returns on works by male artists based on repeat sales over the same period increased by only 8.3%.

The information suggests a bright outlook for investment in works by contemporary female artists and draws attention to that part of the market. As the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report for 2020 shows, however, the gender differential at the top end of the market remains stark:

just under 1% of the artists active in the auction market in 2019 were responsible for works that sold for over $1 million, which has been a consistent finding for over a decade. In 2019, where gender could be assigned, the data showed that on aggregate works by female artists accounted for just 7% of the lots sold and 6% of the value of sales in the auction market. Only 7% of the artists with works selling for over $1 million were women, and this was even more disproportionate at the highest level of over $10 million, where only 5% of the lots sold were by women and these accounted for an even smaller share of sales at 3% by value. (McAndrew 2020, p. 142)

While information from the All Art-Female Index can be used to suggest a positive trend in investment returns on works by contemporary female artists, the fuller informational picture reveals the limited view that this data actually offers about the current auction market for art by women.

This use of data suggests a connection between performativity and speculative value. Martijn Konings argues that economic action (in which I would include pricing) ‘is inherently anticipatory and forward looking. This means that speculations are constitutive and potentially productive: they are not simply right or wrong predictions about the future, but they can provoke the future, bring into being the economic reality that they project’ (2018, p. 136). His discussion accords with MacKenzie’s notion of performativity in which utterances including economic formulae can put worlds ‘into motion’ or alter outcomes ‘so that they better correspond to the model’ (MacKenzie 2008, p. 19; MacKenzie et al. 2020, p. 3). This idea highlights the importance of the art market statements under discussion beyond their rhetorical force. In the above-mentioned example, selective information derived from one particular index can be used to stimulate a market for work by female artists with the ambition of making art market reality accord with a particular data set.

Miegroet, Alexander and Leunissen have made the point that ‘serious efforts need to be made to collect sales data in the aggregate, on a large scale and in publicly accessible online platforms with a higher degree of informational transparency, trust and reliability’ (2019, p. 11). While various pricing models have been created for the purpose of identifying and evaluating trends in the art market, informational biases in data selection mean that an image is typically given of only parts of the market, segments of which are often taken to represent the whole. The 2019 Art & Finance Report co-published by Deloitte and ArtTactic states:

We have noted an interesting trend among both auction houses (Sotheby’s acquisition of art index company Mei & Moses) and galleries (such as Gagosian) to launch their own art market tools and analytics for their clients. This is a sign that perceptions around art collecting are changing and that clients are demanding more sophisticated art market data, information, and tools when deciding to acquire or sell a work of art. (Deloitte and ArtTactic 2019, p. 79)

This commentary focuses on the production of ‘sophisticated art market data’ for the benefit of collectors. Yet it ignores the point that the knowledge generated by the models is disseminated for the purposes of reinforcing a particular image of the market dominated by a limited number of cultural intermediaries. Beyond the relevance of this strategy for the purposes of supporting the speculative value of art assets, I suggest that there is a broader performative goal in these intertwined acts of data management and knowledge production. This is the desire on the part of dominant artworld institutions to perpetuate the myth that there exists a single, integrated market for the sale and purchase of art. I shall explore this idea and its wider cultural significance in the final section of this article.

The myth of a global market

In a short article about art and globalization published in 2007, Noëll Carroll argued that the opening years of the twenty-first century had witnessed the emergence of an ‘integrated, interconnected, transnational artworld’ (2007, p. 132). Although he was sensitive to the fact that globalization is neither truly global nor affects countries in the same way or at the same pace, Carroll argued that the increased volume of informational exchanges about art and artists was fuelled by ‘an interlocking set of transnational institutions’ (2007, p. 136). In his argument, this network includes a mixture of places and practices: art fairs, biennials, tourist destinations, websites, and curatorial practices capable of promoting flows of information between artists, museums, commercial galleries, and publics. Carroll did not deny or underestimate the importance of other styles and traditions of art making that fall outside these spaces of exchange. Rather, he sought to account for, and understand the implications of, a transnational culturescape.

For Carroll the benefit of information flows across individuals, institutions, and nations lies in the fact that they promote ‘sense-making strategies or associative pathways’ that equip audiences with the intellectual and imaginative tools necessary to understand and interpret ambitious art (2007, p. 140). In his view, a transnational artworld is characterized by exchanges that create a ‘common language’ across various divides for the purpose of understanding an art object, installation, or performance.⁸ The depth and extent of this sharing of information was, in Carroll’s view, unique to the moment:

what we are witnessing now differs from the past insofar as what we see emerging is something like a single, integrated, cosmopolitan institution of art, organized transnationally in such a way that the participants, from wherever they hail, share converging or overlapping traditions and practices at the same time that they exhibit and distribute their art in internationally coordinated venues. (Carroll 2007, p. 136)

Carroll’s view was inherently optimistic. His vision of a global artworld involved a sharing of epistemic resources that resulted in a cosmopolitan language capable of facilitating the reception and interpretation of art across socio-cultural differences. Although Carroll did not mention the art market, the kind of data proliferation that I have discussed in this article could – at face value – be added to the dissemination of information that supports such a transnational organization of art.

Writing in 2013, David Joselit offered a different view of the structure of the artworld and the circulation of art through various networks of exchange. In his account, the successful contemporary global artwork is ‘an emissary, whose power arises out of cultural translation rather than avant-garde innovation, a form of international currency that can cross borders effortlessly’ (2013, p. 21). In keeping with this idea, artists with successful global careers are, Joselit argues, those who operate ‘with a high quotient of connectivity bordering on the status of a brand’ (2013, p. 73). While Carroll argued for the existence of transnational co-operation in a system of cosmopolitan exchange, Joselit envisages the networked art object as an extra-territorial currency that can navigate or circumvent the conduits of international finance.⁹

My argument is that the idea of a single, integrated market for art is a myth designed to support the power of international art dealers and auction houses who cater to the cross-border circulation of art as an asset class. It is in the interests of these operations to convince potential buyers that there exists a fully networked economic and cultural sphere and that the information provided about it is an accurate reflection of ‘the state of the art market’ as a whole (Sotheby’s 2020, emphasis added). Art history is folded into narratives of contemporary art production, rendering aesthetic innovation ‘safe’ for buyers, and information that once came from different quarters is increasingly managed by dominant players in one part of the market. Developing ideas about the performativity of economic models, this marshalling of epistemic resources supports a conception of speculative value that, in turn, reinforces the role of the relevant modelling strategies. Those who control the information and discourses that shape such strategies thus exert disproportionate power within this econo-cultural sphere.

The image of a single, integrated art market has implications for conceptions of art history, for contemporary museum collecting, and for artists themselves. It is in the interests of dealers and auction houses to have works by ‘their’ artists enter museums and this, in turn, guarantees the sales-worthiness of works by those institutions. Not only does this extend a conservative art canon, but it also shapes an anticipated history of art populated by a narrow range of artists thought to be ‘collectable’. This also helps to explain why between 2007 and 2015 artists represented by only five international art dealers enjoyed solo museum shows in the US (Halperin 2015).

As commentators have pointed out, the global art economy is marked by significant inequality between art producers, with many artists barely able to make a living from their creative practice (Sholette 2010, Haiven 2018). Furthermore, as Carroll notes, there are entire fields of art production that fall outside the institutional and epistemic framework of the international art trade. Perpetuating the myth of a single, integrated market operates, therefore, to maintain and reinforce such inequality by excluding a wide range of art production and by convincing audiences that the knowledge produced a small cadre of market makers is an authoritative view of aesthetic value and of the art world itself.

This article has argued that the proliferation and circulation of information about art reinforces the power of a group of institutions that control a small, but lucrative percentage of one particular market. The issue on which I have focused is the deployment of art history and price data to support the speculative value of artworks and to maintain a knowledge asymmetry between dominant institutions and art publics. While Hayek showed how dispersed information avoided concentrations of epistemic power, I have argued that the contemporary art world generates the illusion of dispersed resources that, in fact, remain within the purview of powerful institutions.

It might be argued that this management of data is simply an aspect of the marketing operations undertaken by a minority of international businesses. My point, however, is that there are wider implications of this for the future of art and the livelihoods of artists. In the absence of challenges to an image of ‘the’ art market as proposed and defended by major dealers and auction houses, information that fuels speculative pricing models is broadly accepted as knowledge about aesthetic value. This means that artists with stronger ‘brands’ are likely to receive solo shows, that art history will attend to those whose works attract the highest prices, and that the majority of artists will be ignored by art institutions and audiences. In its examination of the logic of pricing and uses of art market data, this article has argued that the curated information which fuels conceptions of a single, integrated market risks sidelining heterogeneous creative practices that, in reality, populate a broad range of creative spheres. More than a mere sign of an artefact’s current or future financial value, price attribution reveals structures of power and epistemic authority that impact on wider conceptions of cultural value and canon formation in contemporary art worlds.

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Notes on contributors

Kathryn Brown

Kathryn Brown is a Senior Lecturer in art history and visual culture at Loughborough University (UK). Her books and articles span nineteenth- and twentieth-century French art, digital art history, contemporary art, and art markets. She is the series editor of Contextualizing Art Markets for Bloomsbury Academic.

Notes

1 The Kunstkompass seeks to chart artists’ reputations based on key signifiers including solo and group exhibitions, participation in biennials, the location of exhibitions, museum acquisitions, and critical reviews. For more detailed discussion of the Kunstkompass and the presence of biases in its methodology see Moulin (1995, p. 55), Quemin (2015) and Leduc (2019).

2 See also Bronk (2013, pp. 85–86) for a discussion of Hayek’s views of the productive role of subjective opinions and perspectives in the social sciences.

3 As Braden and Teekens (2019) longitudinal study of art networks has shown, it is not merely an artist’s reputation that is important for the successful sale of art. Rather, it is the artist’s ‘status’ – determined by explicit comparison to other artists – that plays a determining role in achieving higher prices at auction. Their study indicates that ‘status associations are constructive to increasing prestige; however, at a certain point, an artist’s reputation takes over as the main mechanism explaining auction price’ (2019, p. 12). The sales strategies examined in the present article signal an awareness of this point, as Gagosian’s experts explicitly build a network of ‘status associations’ around the artists on show.

4 To give a further example, at Art Basel Miami, Gagosian often teams up with another major dealer, Jeffrey Deitch, to host an exhibition. As was noted in the case of ‘Pop Minimalism Minimalist Pop’ of 2018, the show was ‘dominated by the expected club of canonical men, almost all of them white: Damien Hirst, Donald Judd, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Richard Prince, to name just a few’ (Cascone 2018). Deitch accepted the point and stated that if there had been more time, the show would have reflected ‘a more diverse view’ (Ibid). As my analysis in this article has suggested, there would seem little incentive to do so on the grounds that the Anglo-European art canon is a useful tool in the business operation of the gallerists.

5 The other primary methodology for price tracking in the art market is hedonic regression, an analysis that is based on a range of value signifiers across objects. This includes consideration of characteristics including, for example, the medium, size, and theme of the works, issues relating to the artist (e.g. reputation), and the social biography of the work itself (e.g. provenance, previous sale locations). For further discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the two methods see Renneboog and Spaenjers (2013), Van Miegroet et al. (2019).

6 The ‘global art market’ is understood in the Report as the global sales of art and antiques. This was estimated at $64.1 billion in 2019 (McAndrew 2020, p. 28).

7 As an example of this that relates to the earlier part of the present discussion, Braden and Teekens argue that ‘reputation and status interact on a feedback loop, where both promote and strengthen each other’s growth’ (2019, p. 11).

8 See also Raymonde Moulin’s discussion of the distinctiveness of the international market for contemporary art that is ‘inseparably combined with a process of cultural promotion; it depends on an international network of galleries and an international network of cultural institutions’ (1995, p. 33).

9 As Max Haiven notes, the increasing financialization of art ‘is part and parcel of a set of shifts that have dissolved the line between culture and economics, art and finance, as never before’ (2018, p. 17). The highly networked system of art fairs supports this construction of value and, as Christian Morgner (2014) argues, has facilitated a concentration of connections that creates prices and publics. More recently, Joselit has pursued a more positive version of ‘image deregulation’ that entails ‘recalibrating long-established modernist hierarchies’, redistributing image wealth, and avoiding the monetization of global contemporary art (2020, xxi).