Category Archives: Art

Survival of the fittest, music edition…

I love stories about how industries/organizations/people react to big changes in their worlds, but have you ever read an article and come away with a suspicion that people don’t really know anything? I know, I know, political punditry (and any article that starts, ‘What Obama needs to do is..’). Anyhow, I somehow felt this nagging […]

'Prudent' pricing, the Pain Caucus, and the Protestant Ethic

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 […]

Dealers As Guardians

(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

Auction claiming – to add to the database

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!

Are Art Auctions any Different from other Markets?

(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 […]

Commoditization, or something like it

Can performance art and other ‘hard to monetize’ art be included in our study? Some thoughts on commoditization.

Contours of the project

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. […]

Adjust your feed readers

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 […]

New semester, new purposes

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 […]

the inducements of rationality

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!