Chair

Terry Smith (University of Pittsburgh)

Panellists

Jeni Fulton (Art Basel, Zurich University of the Arts), Olav Velthuis (University of Amsterdam), Michael Hutter (WZB Berlin Social Science Centre), David Throsby (Macquarie University, Sydney)

Symbolic Capital and the Art Market: Supervenience in the Mechanisms of Valuation in Contemporary Art

Jeni Fulton (Art Basel, Zurich University of the Arts)

The concept of artistic value, or ‘quality’ has undergone significant shifts since the advent of the 21st Century with art entering the era of ‘contemporaneity’. Art criticism, formerly the gatekeeper of value judgements, entered a series of crises as art’s economic value gained symbolic importance on its own, in parallel to the rapid rise of the art market since the 2008 financial crisis. The growth of the art fair, the rise of the art index, and the entrance of short-term speculators into the art market – most evident in the field of digital art backed by non-fungible tokens, or NFTs – have financialised the value of art to a degree never seen before. The quantification of value has become increasingly significant with the rise of the internet and the accessibility of large amounts of auction data, with indices and ranking systems presenting shortcuts for estimating an artist’s value. The average time to resell an artwork has declined over the past years: according to the 2023 Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting, just under half (47%) of financially motivated collectors were holding on to works for as little as 1-3 years in 2022 and 2023. This phenomenon is exacerbated in the field of digital art backed by NFTs, where the financial value of an artwork is immediately visible via an NFT trading platform such as Tezos or OpenSea. Here, the average resale period is around one month. The financialisation of art has resulted in an increased production of ‘branded art’ and ‘fairism’, where artists produce art that responds to these conditions, with painting being the most sought-after medium. These developments have resulted in a bifurcation of the art field: analysis conducted by Artnet in 2022 identified a cohort of artists widely shown at biennials and written about by mainstream arts publications that had little overlap with artists most visible on the primary and secondary art markets (dealers and auction houses).

However, in a climate of continuing economic uncertainty and the crypto crisis, art writing and discourse, as a form of ‘symbolic capital’, appears to have retrieved some of its former, diagnostic powers and role as structuring device for the art market as I will argue. The launches of digital publications such as Outland.art point to the continued necessity for gatekeeper publications to lend some structure to the field of new artistic production, contributing to its historiography. The symbolic value of an artwork remains inherent to its long-term economic valuation, with the market a poor proxy for identifying the long-term relevancy of artistic production.

The Return of the Medici? The Impact of Private Art Museums on the Valuation of Contemporary Art

Olav Velthuis (University of Amsterdam)

One of the most striking institutional reconfigurations of the contemporary art field is the recent rise of private art museums: according to a new database established at the University of Amsterdam, there are currently 446 private museums for modern and contemporary art, of which the vast majority has been established in the 21st century.  This rise is highly controversial: according to some they are neo-aristocratic institutions which translate economic into cultural inequality, while others argue that they democratize and support art, especially when government support is absent or declining.

What the impact of these museums is on the valuation of art is likewise up for debate. In academic studies, claims have been made that these museums are predominantly following market trends and are focused on ‘blue chip’ segments of the market. Others, by contrast, suggest that private museums are more flexible than public museums and can afford to take more artistic risk in the curatorial choices they make and the works they collect. But in the end, we still know little what it means when a private art museum takes an interest in a work of art or an artist, by acquiring or exhibiting it: should it be seen as a form of symbolic consecration, which prompts other institutions to value the artwork differently, and may even impact its market value? And if so, which private museums are likely to have such impact, on whom, under which circumstances, and how does this impact manifest itself?

This paper addresses these questions by presenting a typology of private museums which accounts for the different positions which they take within art markets as well as the contemporary art field more widely; it develops an analytical framework for studying the impact of private art museums on the valuation of contemporary art. And finally, it presents new data which demonstrate the (limits of) the impact of private museums on valuation processes.

Cultural capital in Netflix’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery: A case study

Michael Hutter (WZB Berlin Social Science Centre)

In the literature on cultural economics, there are many contributions on the special properties of artistic or creative labor, but there is little on the other fundamental factor of production, namely real capital (as opposed to financial capital, which is intensively researched in connection with markets for material artworks). In macroeconomic theory, real capital – encompassing every component of the actual process of producing consumption goods – is split into physical and human capital. Human capital has properties of information, which is a public good diffused among actors with acquired skills and knowledge. The focus of research is on investment in “discoveries”; “innovation” or “ideas” are a major source of economic growth. Is it possible to extend that scope beyond “factual” information to the kind of “fictional” information that is characteristic of artistic goods, like operas, poems and sculptures?

The paper introduces basic components for a value theory of fictional information. It includes human capital accumulated by art producers and art consumers in a location as well as physical capital accumulated in musical scores, literary archives and art collections. Regarding human capital, the network structure that characterizes works of “fictional information” is a central feature. It explains phenomena like the emergence of superstars, the persistence of long tails, and the particular agglomeration of visual artworks in public and private museums. In analyzing physical art capital, the argument concentrates on the valuation process for selecting and collecting the relatively few works that will charge new works with new consumable references and meanings. The paper will present an actual case to illustrate the model’s explanatory capacity. The piece of physical capital in question is the film “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”, released by Netflix in 2022. The value-charged references that provide this audiovisual work with valuable meaning - from the Beatles’ “White Album” to Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” - will be identified.

Respondent: Changes in the discourse on art and value since Beyond Price, 2008

David Throsby (Macquarie University, Sydney)