In his book Talking Prices, Olav Velthuis points out that the collapse of the art market in the early 1990s resulted in a widespread shift away from the ‘superstar’ pricing of the go-go 80s, and towards a ‘prudent’ pricing in the 1990s. Art dealers saw the watershed collapse of fantastic(al) prices as a moment not …
(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 …
Can performance art and other ‘hard to monetize’ art be included in our study? Some thoughts on commoditization.
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. …
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 …
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 …
Economic sociologists have long wrestled with the microfoundations of market rationality, and attempted to understand the embeddedness of behavior in the cultural context in which it rests…oh, hell, I just want to post this video of the subway stairs in Stockholm: Have a nice Friday, peoples!
I have written about the experiment going on at Significant Objects before. They buy things at garage sales and thrift stores, make up stories about the objects, and then sell these objects on eBay, with the stories attached as the objects’ descriptions. The premise is that “the object should — according to our hypothesis — …