GLOBALIZATION OF MARKETS FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

ABSTRACT

Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data, this article explores the extent to which Western art markets are globalized by focusing on the nationality of contemporary artists represented by art galleries in Amsterdam and Berlin. Far from the borderless world presupposed in the globalization literature as well as by art dealers themselves, galleries in both countries show a strong home bias, whilst American artists dominate in Amsterdam and Berlin galleries. The article explains this home bias by focusing on widely diffused organizational practices, business conventions and role models within market settings, which are the outcome of cultural globalization, but also pose barriers to art dealers' global aspirations.

Keywords:

• globalization
• galleries
• market
• contemporary art
• organizational practice

Notes

¹The major part of the data for this paper was collected while the author was a Visiting Scholar at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. The WZB, and in particular Michael Hütter, director of the research group on Cultural Sources of Newness, are gratefully acknowledged. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at a seminar on globalization and cultural industries at the Department of Social Geography, University of Amsterdam, the Center for Organizational Innovation of Columbia University and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam. Special thanks to Robert Kloosterman, Hans Abbing, Ton Bevers and David Stark for their helpful comments.

²For instance, while in 2002, there was only one Chinese contemporary artist on the list of the world's top 100 (computed by the leading art market consultancy Art Price on the basis of auction revenue), in 2008 this list contained 34 Chinese artists. By contrast, the list showed just 20 American artists. In the same year, 44 Asian artists were represented, against 27 from Europe.

³Following American usage, the terms art dealer and art gallery will be used interchangeably in this article.

⁴As of February 2010.

⁵In The Netherlands, interviews were conducted by MA-student Janus de Visser, for which he is gratefully thanked.

⁶The number may be higher because the country of birth could not be retrieved for all artists represented by the galleries in the dataset.

⁷ t-Tests were run, not reported here, in order to analyse differences between the countries represented in Amsterdam and Berlin galleries.

⁸Stephanie Cooperman, ‘The Big Event: Art Basel Miami Beach’, Forbes Magazine 27.10.2008, http://www.forbes.com/forbes-life-magazine/2008/1027/026.html, last visited on September 13th, 2010.

⁹This division between types of interaction related to evaluating the quality of the works of art and gathering knowledge about them, is akin to financial markets, where geographers have made a distinction between the trade in transparent assets such as ‘blue chip’ stocks, which can take place anywhere, and opaque assets such as private equity stakes, where proximity and strong relationships between trading partners are needed (Clark and O'Connor 1997; Faulconbridge et al. 2007: 286–87).