Rethinking Markets

(by Ana T.) This article touches on a lot of the topics we’ve been discussing in class. Protection of artists, embeddedness and Art speculation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/arts/design/17blacklisting.html?ref=design

This post is a marker post for the 3910 class to ‘claim’ 2 auctions to add to the database. Pick what you like, but leave what you want in comments please!

(by Sebastian B)
As far as I got acquainted to Pr. Levin’s research project, I wanted to stress the need for not overstating the singularity of art auctions relative to author forms of commodities and selling. What happens in an art auction is probably not very different from any other marketing process.

 We usually grant a very special status to art and view its commodification as problematic. On the one hand, the market is supposed to feature the ocean of commensurability. On the other, the piece of art is viewed as the unique outcome of a singular mind. Besides, auctions bear a specific aura among the different forms of commodification. As a social event, there are meant to dramatize the adjustment between scarcity in supply and multiplicity in demand. The auction, it is assumed, has the magical power of fixing a legitimate price in the realm of uncertainty as opposed to the sell of mass production at a price set before any selling agreement is made. Hence, Charles Smith’s suggests a natural connection between auctions and art. He argues that uncertainty is so high about the value of singular art pieces that a public auction is necessary to give them a value.

There is something I really don’t like about this claim. It assumes that there is such thing as a transparent market where a company sets once for all the value of its widgets. In fact, what happens in art auctions is only the display of what secretly guides the marketing process of most things. The only difference is that according to the economic ideology, commodities are produced and sold according to a transparent, straightforward process. In the course of their design and marketing, coffee mugs or any other consumer product, just as art, encounter redefinitions about their value: they all have an awkward biography.

Such is, at least, the argument of Michel Callon. In the line of Bruno Latour re-consideration of material life, this French sociologist argues that every single product is individualized. There are not two customers who define the value of a product in the same way. The final sale of a product results from the process of adjustment between the properties of the object and the “world” of the customer. The purpose of selling in the auction is not to make up for the uncertainty about the object’s value but rather to meet the demands of a particular “world”, that of the art dealers who attend auctions, and the product. The auction is a redefinition, among many others, of the nature of the art piece, just as when you buy an apple you give it a new significance.

Thus, in my view, we would miss a point if we primarily saw the appraisers work as merely turning “singularity” into “commensurability”. The way I would see the appraiser’s work is a contribution to a process of integrating singularity into a good. It could be compared to the influence of the sales manager within a company over the existence of a technically innovative product. Why not shifting to this paradigm when talking about art rather than staying in the rather dry “art vs. market” dichotomy?

References
Charles Smith, Auctions: The Social Construction of Value
Michel Callon, “La qualité”, Sociologie du travail, 44 (2002), p. 255-287

Jenn and Emily raise an interesting point for the project, that is whether and how to include objects that resist monetization. These things are often meant to be art (though sometimes they are meant to be artistic), but they are equally meant to be impossible to package and monetize. Some whole art schools (Dadaism, for instance) were at least in part predicated on a critique of bourgeois society, art markets very much included.

In many ways, this is the inverse of someone like Damien Hirst,  Murakami, or Warhol, whose art is commentary on consumption culture by making it hyper-consumptive and hyper-marketable (and marketed). So if we are going to include art whose artistic value is that it is meant to be commodified, we should probably include its inverse.

Theoretically, I can see how this would work. IMHO, one of the main things that has to happen to art in order to achieve commoditization (I usually use that word interchangeably with commodification) is for it to be turned into something durable, alienable, singular, while still retaining its cultural value.

One piece of the 'formatting the market' puzzle

I have in mind how this works, in most cases it is simply that the object itself is both the art and the commodity. But these are really distinct things. In the case of a performance, the art is ephemeral and impossible to ‘sell’ (though we could of course sell tickets to the performance); so to make it salable, it has to be made into a video recording, and that could be bought and sold. Likewise street art – people chiseling Banksy murals off of concrete walls, for instance. It’s not that the art is not art when it’s performance, it just can’t be bought and sold in that form.

But someone like Bill Viola sells pieces for hundreds of thousands of dollars (that piece, Quintet of the Silent, came in at US$274,816). The description in the catalog read:

Video installation comprised of single-channel colour video on wall-mounted plasma display. 72.4 x 120.7 x 10.2 cm. (28 1/2 x 47 1/2 x 4 in).   This work is from an edition of five and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

So theoretically, I would say yes and yes, that we can and should study art that cannot be monetized. Because it means that the ‘other’ art can be monetized, and I want to know how that works.

But (and there is always a but), how to do this? Practically and empirically, how would we incorporate tribal art or performance art or video art into the project? It seems that we might interview avant-garde art gallerists? Can we do this without bumping into the primary market/secondary market division? I’ve become more practical nowadays to say that we can only study it if its possible, but not to let perfect be the enemy of the good. How can we include this kind of art?

Pulling back the curtain here a bit on what sociologists do, rather than what sociology is. Students are participants in the project, not as research assistants (it would be more efficient and more sane for me to actually hire a couple grad students if this was the route I wanted to go), but as participants. It is a rough go at a small collaboration across disciplines, and to make less mysterious what it is that professors actually do.

The aims of the project (and the course) is to understand how market intermediaries make markets possible. That is, what are the organizational, institutional, and cultural practices that make it possible for markets to look the way that they do? My initial aim is to see art specialists and art advisers/consultants as key agents in this regard. This is part of a larger aim to understand how appraisers of fine art, real estate, finance, all do their work. And how what appear as self-regulating, natural markets are a result of that work. For the most insider-y of readers, it is organizational sociology + cultural institutionalism + social studies of finance. These are the waters we ply.

The initial research proposal is available as .pdf or MS-Word document.

This week was our first ‘real’ class (as opposed to the intitial class, where I hemmed and hawed through most of it, trying to explain what I wanted and whether we would even have the class to begin with. Actually, scratch that. I say ‘um’, ‘like’, and ‘so’ terribly often in every class). In it, we talked about this proposal, what it contains, what it lacks. I am now revising it, but it seemed to me that there were a number of excellent suggestions. They focused on limits on the commodity itself, the key participants, and the differences between trying to predict prices and understanding how prices get ‘made’. Here are some of the more interesting things we’ve come up with:

Apologies to those who follow my feed on the spurt of student activity around these parts. As I mentioned earlier, I am running a class research seminar on Art and pricing. So there may be some guest authors for a while. If you like, you can exit – or you can comment. I’d obviously love to see the latter, but as most of you lurk about anyhow, we’ll see. They are a small but promising mix of sociology/art history/economics majors. Hopefully we’ll learn something!

I’ve been pretty lax about keeping up with the blog, and I am teaching a research seminar this semester on pricing in art markets. I’m likely to turn the blog over to that purpose for awhile, so if there are dramatic changes that you find unappealing, you could wander away if you like. Or, you can participate in the fun. Things should get going this week.