Cosmopolitan Canvases (Digital online) | Released: 01 Oct 2017

Since the late 1990s, contemporary art markets have emerged rapidly outside of Europe and the United States. China is now the world's second largest art market. In counties as diverse as Brazil, Turkey and India, modern and contemporary art has been recognized as a source of status, or a potential investment tool among the new middle classes. At art auctions in the US, London and Hong Kong, new buyers from emerging economies have driven up prices to record levels. The result of these changes has been an increase in complexity, interconnectedness, stratification and differentiation of contemporary art markets. Our understanding of them is still in its early stages and empirical research in the field of globalization of high arts is still scarce.

This book brings together recent, multidisciplinary, cutting edge research on the globalization of art markets. Focusing on different regions, including China, Russia, India and Japan, as well as different institutions and organizations, the chapters in this volume study the extent to which art markets indeed become global. They show the various barriers to, and the effects of, globalization on the art market's organizational dynamics and the everyday narratives of people working within the art industry. In doing so, they recognize the coexistence of various ecologies of contemporary art exchange, and sketch the presence of resilient local networks of actors and organizations. Some chapters show Europe and the US continue to dominate, especially when taking art market rankings and the most powerful events such as Art Basel into account. However, other chapters argue that things such as art fairs are truly global events and that the 'architecture of the art market' which has originally been developed in Europe and the US from the 19th century onwards, is increasingly adopted across the world.

About the Author:
Olav Velthuis, Associate Professor, University of Amsterdam, Stefano Baia Curioni, Associate Professor, Bocconi University

Olav Velthuis is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam. He is currently studying the emergence and development of art markets in the BRIC-countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Velthuis is the author of Imaginary Economics (NAi Publishers, 2005) and Talking Prices. Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton University Press, 2005), which received the Viviana Zelizer Distinguished Book Award of the American Sociological Association for the best book in economic sociology (2006). Together with Maria Lind of Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm), he recently edited the book Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios (Sternberg Press, 2012). A recognized authority on art markets, his journalistic writings have appeared in among others Artforum, the Art Newspaper and the Financial Times.

Stefano Baia Curioni is Associate Professor at the Department of Institutional Analysis of Bocconi University in Milano. He is founder, former Director and vice President of the ASK (Art, Science, Knowledge) research center of Bocconi University, visiting professor of cultural economics at IMT institute Lucca for the Phd Heritage management and development. In the last fifteen years Baia Curioni concentrated his research and teaching activities in the field of cultural institutions and policies with a specific interest in the historical analysis of the transformation of art system and fields. His last book, Mercanti dell'Opera, is dedicated to the economic history of Italian Operatic music scene in the XIX and XX century. Within the ASK research center, Baia Curioni is leading a research project on the contemporary art legitimation processes and served the Italian Ministry of Culture for different intervention in the last years. He is Board Member of the Ratti Foundation in Como