Chair
Kim Oosterlinck (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and Co-Chair TIAMSA)
Panellists
Yuqing Song (Université libre de Bruxelles), Marie Blum (IESEG School of Management, Lille), Suzie (Jiaxin) Liu and Ruth Rentschler (University of South Australia, Adelaide), Rafaelle Hassine (EHESS & LAS [Collège de France, CNRS, EHESS], Paris)
1 + 1 > 2? An Exploration of the Relationship between Collaboration and Creative Success
Yuqing Song (Université libre de Bruxelles)
Artists have long been often seen as lonely geniuses. Literature on branding theories, however, suggests that the value of an artist’s brand is created through a complex co-creation mechanism with a wide range of stakeholders, including experts, dealers, and even collaborators. What effects does the involvement of these people, especially collaborators, have on the value of art? The present study explores the market for collaborative artworks with a focus on one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Zhang Daqian (1899-1983), who is often dubbed as the “Picasso of the East.”
Using a unique dataset of Chinese painting and calligraphy artworks (n=9,955) sold in auctions worldwide between 1994 and 2022, we reveal an underlying, broad network of both collaborators and dedicators with 1,226 nodes and 2,015 edges, evolved throughout the artist’s life. In the present paper, we focus on the network of collaborators which is composed of 248 nodes and 782 edges. Among the collaborative artworks (n=675, 6.8%), there are variations in, including but not limited to: the frequencies of collaboration (ranging from 1 to 93) of different artists, the numbers of collaborators in each item (ranging from 0 to 15+), the number of the works the authors created together (ranging from 1 to 13+), and the position of Zhang Daqian’s name (first, middle, and last position).
With hedonic regression models integrated with social network analysis (SNA), we shed light on the valuation of collaborative artworks. We illustrate that: i) The market mechanism of collaborative artworks, as a neglected market section, can be quite different from that of the single-authored artworks. And on average, the prices of collaborative artworks are lower than those of single-authored ones; ii) Different forms of collaboration affect the market value of collaborative artworks differently. Notably, we suggest that some collaborators’ names contribute positively to the prices of co-branded artworks, and that the relationships between the number of collaborators’ names / the number of collaborated items and the logarithm of prices follow a convex relationship: as the number of collaborators increases, the price decreases at a diminishing rate; iii) There is a positive, concave relationship between network centrality measures and the market performance of co-branded artworks, suggesting that the degrees of connectedness positively affect log prices, but after a certain point, the positive effect starts to decline.
Our findings underscore the significant role of collaboration and social connectedness in shaping artistic practices and market outcomes in art markets. We suggest that Zhang Daqian's relational work within his social circles contributes significantly to his creative success. This paper offers new empirical evidence on the market reception of collaborative artworks but also the construction of a celebrity artist brand. By unravelling Zhang Daqian's collaborative practices and social networks, we provide valuable insights into the mechanisms driving value creation in the art market, with broad implications for various stakeholders ranging from artists and dealers to collectors and researchers.
What price if we all like it? Effects of liking and emotions on art prices
Marie Blum (IESEG School of Management, Lille)
This paper investigates whether consensus on liking and emotion play a role in explaining art auction prices. We first conduct a survey to measure the degree of liking and emotion for 124 artworks in two distinct social groups: art collectors (i.e. art market insiders, N=146) and art-novice subjects (i.e. art market outsiders, N=192). As art stimuli, we focus on the comic art market, as it is one of the rare art markets in which it is relatively easy to reach collectors. We then construct an index of consensus to measure the degree of consensus for liking and emotion among individuals of both social groups. This approach enables us to explore the relationship between real art auction prices and the consensual aesthetic and emotional perception of insiders and outsiders using a hedonic pricing model. We find that liking and emotional consensus are reflected in art prices but differently depending on the social group. Specifically, our results show that artworks generally achieve higher prices when they are consensually liked by insiders or eliciting positive emotions to them. This result shows that collectors, who are art market insiders, have integrated common aesthetic norms about what is considered as “good art” and prices are determined depending on artwork compliance with insiders’ codes and what they think is estimable art. However, we find that what is consensually liked by or evokes positive emotions to outsiders generally achieve lower prices at auction. This finding is remarkable as it shows that aesthetic codes and information shared among collectors do not spread to outsiders, but rather go in the opposite direction. Our contribution is twofold. First, this study fills a gap in the economics of art literature by considering subjective judgement of artworks in addition to objective factors in art pricing models. Namely, we investigate in this paper the influence of consensus in art tastes and emotions of different groups of individuals on prices at auction, an unexplored direction of causality. Second, this research is the first to study art perceptions in an actual group of market insiders in the economicsense of the term, since studies on art evaluations consider groups of art experts – in contrast to naïve subjects – such as art students or individuals having an artistic background.
Masterpieces at the price of a McDonald’s Meal: the cognitive legitimacy of art securitization platforms
Suzie (Jiaxin) Liu and Ruth Rentschler (University of South Australia, Adelaide)
What is art securitization? It is an art investment mechanism emerged since 2017 in the art market. Adopting blockchain technology, art securitization platforms fractionalize ownership of valuable artworks into art shares, offer art shares to investors at an affordable price, and enable art share trade among investors. Prior to the emergence of art securitization, the value of the most important artworks was established in public auctions (Ashenfelter & Graddy, 2003). However, a price-fixing scandal of two major auction houses, Sotheby's and Christie's, was exposed to the public in 2001, revealing the transparency and affordability issues in the auction market. While the conventional means of art distribution, the art auction, is 'constraining what can be done to create an effective market, novel investment mechanism and new ventures can 'open up otherwise unavailable possibilities' (Becker, 1982).
As any other new ventures, art securitization platforms need to overcome the liability of newness and achieve legitimacy from their audiences (Zimmerman & Zeitz, 2002). This study examines how art securitization platforms leverage two distinct approaches, conveying distinctiveness and conforming to prevailing norms, to acquire cognitive legitimacy from online audiences.
This study uses a multi-case research design and investigates four online art securitization platforms, namely Artory, Maecenas, Masterworks, and Otis. We measure cognitive legitimacy by assessing the level of public knowledge about art securitization as a novel activity, and consider it attained when a platform's art securitization activities become so well- acknowledged that it is taken from granted (Hannan & Freeman, 1989; Aldrich & Fiol, 1994). In doing so, we conduct content analysis on 7,625 social media posted by art securitization platforms to decode how each start-up overcome cognitive liability. We then analysed 2,510 social media comments and 26 media reviews to assess audiences' perception on each art securitization platform.
We find that underlining technological distinctiveness assists art securitization platforms in gaining legitimacy from novel-seeking audiences, while triggering contradictory judgments from other audiences in a longer term. This contradictory perception, however, can be mitigated by acquiring regulatory endorsements and forming collaborations with established corporations. Our findings extend theory on the legitimacy management in new ventures. They do so by demonstrating that in order to be acknowledged by audiences, conveying technological distinctiveness does not work alone without conforming to prevailing norms.
References
Aldrich, H. E., & Fiol, C. M. (1994). Fools Rush in? The Institutional Context of Industry Creation. The Academy of Management Review, 19(4), 645–670.
Ashenfelter, O., & Graddy, K. (2003). Auctions and the Price of Art. Journal of Economic Literature, 41(3), 763–787.
Becker, H. S. (2008). Art Worlds. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Hannan, M. T., & Freeman, J. (1984). Structural Inertia and Organizational Change. American Sociological Review, 49(2), 149–164.
Zimmerman, M. A., & Zeitz, G. J. (2002). Beyond Survival: Achieving New Venture Growth by Building Legitimacy. The Academy of Management Review, 27(3), 414–431.
Strategizing from the contemporary artist’s studio: Controlling the market, constructing notoriety
Rafaelle Hassine (EHESS & LAS [Collège de France, CNRS, EHESS], Paris)
The production of contemporary artworks, circulating in international trade and museum networks, is organized according to the model of project-based capitalism (Dubois 2021, Boltanski and Chiapello 2011). A renowned contemporary artist’s studio can bring together highly qualified workers involved simultaneously in different projects: managers, designers, communications managers, production managers, assistants, and so on. Embracing this model equates artists with entrepreneurs (Menger 2003) or company directors, who have to secure sufficient income (through sales of works of art, artist fees received for commissions, and exhibitions) to pay for highly qualified labor. It has previously been argued that such studios, "do not require economizing measures, and they do not determine the prices of artworks" (Beech 2015: 311). This argument reinforces the supposed distance between the creation of a work of art and the market, which paradoxically conditions the commercial success of art (Bourdieu 1992).
Based on a six-month ethnography in the Berlin studios of artists represented in galleries across Western Europe, East Asia, and North America, this paper will analyze how prices and international distribution of works on the primary market are determined in studios. First, I would address how the offer on the primary market is constructed by artists and studio managers in conversation with gallery staff. Then, I would detail how these decisions are intricately linked to studio economics, constructing the artist’s reputation, and securing his/her place in art history.
Selected bibliography:
Beech, D. (2015). Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics. Leiden: Brill.
Boltanski, L. et Chiapello, E. (2011). Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, 2nde ed. Paris: Gallimard.
Boltanski, L. et Esquerre, A. (2017). Enrichissement : une critique de la marchandise. Paris : Gallimard.
Bourdieu, P. (1992). Les règles de l’art : genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Dubois, B. (2021). « Redéfinir une juridiction professionnelle. Artistes et assistantes de production dans les projets d’art contemporain », Sociologie du travail 63 (3). https://doi.org/10.4000/sdt.39944
Menger, P-M. (2003). Portrait de l’artiste en travailleur. Métamorphoses du capitalisme. Paris : La République des idées/Seuil