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There are other income factors, besides the aggregate national income and labour income factors discussed in Ch. 4, that contribute as much uncertainty to the incomes of individuals and organizations as do many risks currently traded in financial markets. If those who retail insurance policies against risks of changes in values of claims on incomes or service flows are to be able to tailor their insurance to the various exposures that their different clients have to these risks, they will want to layoff in hedging markets the risks of changes in these income factors that influence them because they are providing the insurance policies. This chapter considers some of the most salient of these other markets: real estate, unincorporated business, and privately held corporations, consumer and producer price index futures, agriculture, and art and collectibles. It also presents some ideas on systematic approaches to finding other markets, including modelling the tendency for co‐movement of incomes and inferring the underlying factors, i.e. looking for the major risk factors to incomes for which new markets would be most useful.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book by identifying six assumptions underlying current dominant understandings of cultural globalization. It goes on to show how the chapters in the book interrogate, discuss, and frequently criticize these assumptions. The main assumptions are that (1) cultural globalization is new, (2) reflects globalization, and (3) does so in a linear fashion. Moreover, it is thought to (4) result in a redistribution of cultural power, and (5) in profound cross-border flows of contemporary art; this, in turn, will lead to (6) a convergence in the way contemporary art is marketed across the globe. Instead, we argue that in spite of the fact that markets for contemporary art have emerged across the globe, and in spite of the fact that blueprints for the trade in contemporary art have diffused globally, cross-border flows of art and artists have remained comparatively insignificant.

This chapter examines the history of the predominant model for the distribution of artists’ moving image today. This chapter traces out the history of this distribution model from the late nineteenth century to the present and offers hypotheses concerning its steps towards success in the 1990s. It explores the relationship between the limited edition model and the rental model of the cooperatives, outlines the various criticisms this artificial rarity has provoked, and discusses the possible benefits it might have for artists and collectors.

Offers a history and historiography of Shanghai and Shanghai art before turning to the unique circumstances of the late nineteenth-century art world. Taking advantage of Shanghai’s marketplace, professional artists took on multiple roles as entrepreneurs, celebrities, entertainers and public figures as well as image-makers. Serving a large and anonymous urban clientele, artists made contact with their audiences via fan paintings, art advertising and Shanghai’s growing mass media. The introduction highlights the book’s new avenues of inquiry, ranging from art world infrastructures, histories of mass media, print and reception and its use of primary sources such as the newspaper advertisements, the industrially-produced book, artist writings and period guidebooks.

This chapter explores the origins and nature of Morland's biographical success. It shows that Morland's generally scandalous lifestyle held real interest for many people, not least because the painter had scorned any social norms to which artists usually adhered. It also argues that Morland's unusualness was the result of interconnected factors which affected both the British art market and literature during this period. Indeed, Morland was active at a time when commercial transactions between painters and clients were undergoing significant changes in Britain. This chapter also argues that Morland's natural genius would not have been so widely reported had it not fed into contemporary debates about artistic creation and invention. His appeal as an unconventional painter would have remained unnoticed had there not been a wider interest among readers in literary figures who dwelt on the margins of society. Morland's eccentricities undoubtedly appealed to contemporary literary sensibilities.

This chapter emphasizes the commodifying effects of display. It specifically reveals that sales of Ulúa-style marble vases from Honduras increased after an exhibition of vases in 1992 at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. It uses data from the Lower Ulúa Valley of northwestern Honduras to address the global problem of pillage. It examines how systematically collected archaeological data provide an invaluable tool for exploring the result of pillage on the landscape. The findings of archaeological projects geared toward documenting the cultural history of the region are outlined to give readers a framework. Next, the correlation between intense looting, development, and the art market in Honduras is investigated. Building on these data, it examines the international art market for a specific object type, Ulúa marble vases, and the intensity and aim of looting activities for these vases.

Chapter 2 discusses the long evolution of the market for American art in a brief synopsis of key developments along the way. It explains the early marketing of American art, the romance of collectors with Old Masters, the shift in art education of Americans to Europe (especially Paris and Munich) and the ultimate development of a “unique” American art at the turn of the nineteenth century—involving the mix of European modernism with American influences of the “ashcan” artists and the American modernism sponsored by Alfred Stieglitz. Finally, the shift from pre–World War II art to abstract expressionism and contemporary styles is explained as the result of politics in the postwar period. The chapter includes dichotomized lists of eighty prominent American artists—those born prior to 1900 and those born 1900 through 1960.

This chapter examines the devices through which prices are produced in the contemporary art market. It begins with a review of economic literature on price mechanisms before proceeding with a discussion of how art dealers have sold new works of art by means of posted prices rather than auctions. It then looks at four rare cases in the history of modern art markets in which auctions have been used in order to produce prices for art. One such case involves the British artist Damien Hirst, who managed to sell his work successfully at auction because it was part of a wider event-driven and celebrity-oriented circuit within recent Western art markets. The chapter also explains why agents have deviated from the norm of posted prices and how prices for art are established. It shows that pricing schemes are invariably socially constructed, while in turn social structures, status factors, and power relations must be taken into consideration to understand the outcome of the pricing process.

This chapter addresses the implications of globalization in the market for contemporary art in India. In this emerging art market, the India Art Fair (held annually in Delhi) is the premier event for contemporary art in India. Since its inception in 2008, it grew from a modest regional affair into a well-attended international gathering exhibiting a range of artists and galleries from South East Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Subscribing to Western concepts of displaying and marketing art, art fairs in emerging markets are often seen as engines of globalization and further integration of international art market. However, our survey of galleries, artists, and artworks in Delhi reveals a strong adherence to a local and national identity, suggesting that the India Art Fair functions foremost as a catalyst for the rapidly expanding home market, thereby blending Western influences with indigenous artistic traditions and catering to the new affluent middle classes.

This chapter explores why official art organizations—artists associations and art academies—which regulated artistic production in Soviet Russia and Maoist China, continue to survive despite changing environments and the development of art markets in these countries. This chapter observes path-dependent processes and instances of institutional complementarities that explain the resilience of institutional arrangements. In China, official art organizations are institutionally complementary with the massive state bureaucracy, and confer a high status on their artist-members, creating hierarchies that function as a judgment device in the art market. In Russia, where these organizations do not grant a comparable status, they instead provide everyday support for their commercially disadvantaged artist-members and create an alternative system of economic relations. By drawing attention to local contexts, this chapter advocates a varieties of cultural capitalism approach to the study of art market development.

This chapter contextualizes the current expansion of the Brazilian art market, tracing its roots in the postwar period and the market and institutional field of modern art connected to the emergence of a wealthy middle class in the country. The development of an institutional base and the delineation and professionalization of a group of cultural entrepreneurs occurred against the backdrop of change and instability, marked by alternate periods of economic instability and boom and the military dictatorship and subsequent democratic transition. The early years were marked by exchanges with foreign art institutions and the pioneering role of first-generation migrants in setting up galleries and auction houses. A first, national, boom of the art market took place in the 1980s. More recently, the fields of art and culture more widely have been characterized by neo-liberal policies, exemplified by the laws of fiscal incentives, and a growing international vocation

The Indian contemporary art market developed dramatically over the 1990s and 2000s. More buyers and increased prices for, as well as new attention on, Indian contemporary art, both domestically and abroad, also entailed the maturation of local art scenes, especially in Mumbai and Delhi, as new galleries, art businesses, and museums emerged. At a local level, these transformations are commonly understood as the result of globalization. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Mumbai contemporary art scene, this chapter examines how local art insiders interpret these ongoing changes. By approaching the Indian art market as a system of exchange, it accesses the everyday, informal ways in which individuals encounter the globalizing “art market.” These are indirect, and not explicitly economic. Instead, art exchange is profoundly moral terrain, where interpersonal relationships are entangled with shifting assertions and beliefs about the right and wrong ways of dealing with art objects and money

Chapter 1 introduces the rationale for studying and analyzing the economic aspects of American art as a “category” of art genres and, more generally, it places the market for art in the context of trade for all goods and services. Art, like all traded goods, possesses credence characteristics, but they are present to a significant degree since the requisite assurance of authenticity is often difficult to determine. The chapter also explains why American art can be segmented for study apart from a “homogeneous” art category and also as two markets—one prior to art produced before 1950, and another that has come to be called contemporary American art. Chapter 1 previews the remainder of the book in which both semi-technical issues, such as artistic productivity, auction estimates, and investments, and narrative issues, including art crime, fakes, art marketing “death effects,” and contemporary art bubbles, are dissected from an economic perspective.

Chapter 8 investigates the phenomenon of “art by animals” as a counterpoint to the first part of the book, which focuses on the display of dead bodies and the tensions that emerge in social practices meant to attribute subjectivity to only some of those bodies as a prerequisite for mourning. Rather than focusing on dead bodies as before, Desmond examines the traces left by living animal bodies, activated and captivated in the transnational market for “art” by animals. In particular, she examines items that get designated as “artworks” when they record the physical trace of a specific animal body, such as the imprint of fish scales on paper. Desmond sketches the transnational contours of the market for this type of animal art and the implied continuum that positions the value of artworks along a scale of increasing capacity for “intent” demonstrated by the species producing the works, including seals, birds, and elephants.

This chapter discusses the theoretical terms for understanding the intersections of urban art, ecology, and economy in an underdeveloped city like Haiti's capital, arguing for the social production of Port-au-Prince through activist, political, civic, international, nongovernmental, and even artistic modes of creative urban production. It offers three spatiotemporal or geographic-historical models for understanding the Grand Rue Galerie as a site that is structured and mediated by social forces, relationships internal and external, and interrelationalities with and within Port-au-Prince, its surrounding suburban neighborhoods both affluent and abjectly impoverished, the national context of Haiti, the region of the Caribbean, the hemisphere of the Americas, and the larger globe defined by art markets and artists. These three models are imprecise ones but suggest different alignments in the social production of space.

Building upon the evidence examined in the previous chapters, Chapter 5 analyses the single most widespread and virulent campaign of violence against an artist—that targeting M.F. Husain, mapping precisely the transformation of disconnected, and varied attacks on artists into waging campaigns against them. True, the attacks on Husain since the mid-1990s, and responses in his name, enlarged the word-stock surrounding him, but buried within it the static and isolated view of violence hardly explains the logic and the process of Hindu nationalists’ sustained and obsessive, often even pointless, preoccupation with him. The progress and shifts in their campaigns underline varied and evolving attitudes towards his alleged offences, not always related to the images in question. Given Husain’s extraordinary stature within the art world, and within the world of violent offence-taking, an understanding of the build-up of the campaign waged in his name is essential for any analysis of the phenomenon of violence of offence-taking and its discipline-enforcing attitude towards artists.

This chapter analyzes the risk and return characteristics of investments in artists from the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region over the sample period 2000 to 2012. With hedonic regression modeling the chapter creates an annual index that is based on 3,544 paintings created by 293 MENA artists. The empirical results prove that investing in such a hypothetical index provides strong financial returns. While the results show an exponential growth in sales since 2006, the geometric annual return of the MENA art index is a stable 13.9 percent over the whole period. The chapter concludes that investing in MENA paintings would have been profitable but also note that itr examined the performance of an emerging art market that has only seen an upward trend without any correction, yet.