This book draws on the papers presented at a congress at the University of St. Gallen in 2016 under the title “Art and Market: Alienation or Emancipation?” Organised by the Swiss Sociological Association (SSA)’s Sociology of Arts and Culture Research committee (RC-SAC) in collaboration with the St. Gallen Institute of Sociology and supported by the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAHS), this event sought to discuss the complex and changing relationship between the arts and the market.1
In analysis of art as well as in common representations of artistic creation, the market has often been ascribed an ambivalent role. Some authors have suggested the market brings about the commodification or even the bondage of art. According to the Frankfurt School, the “cultural industry”, as an integrated economic and technological system, produces and disseminates standardised cultural products aimed at fulfilling needs that it itself creates from scratch and at encouraging consumers to conform to dominant norms (Adorno and Horkheimer 1947). In turn, the figure of the “accursed artist” or “artiste maudit” who continues to create pieces of art even when she or he cannot sell them, is often presented as the epitome of “authentic” creation. From this point of view, genuine art only becomes possible by escaping the market, thanks to non-market support, for instance, in the form of private grants or state subsidies.
In his seminal analysis of “the rules of art”, which focused specifically on literature but has a wider scope of application, Pierre Bourdieu (1993) showed that over time, modern artistic creation has formed relatively autonomous production fields, establishing a “reversed economy”. In the latter, art is believed to be valued according to its aesthetic rather than its economic properties—although, in reality, it never truly escapes economic considerations. In the first stage of their structuration, the fields of cultural production therefore defined their own rules against the expectations of “bourgeois” and “social art”. They were then more generally structured according to a constitutive distinction between two subfields, the subfield of restricted, “pure” production organised around aesthetic norms and the judgement of peers, and the subfield of a heteronomous and broader production responding to market-based considerations. Bourdieu showed that this duality structures the contemporary “market of symbolic goods” with an ideal-typical opposition between the consumption of the “aesthete” and the quest for entertainment.
Other sociological studies have stressed the central role of the market in the process of the autonomisation of the arts. Historically, the market has contributed to the casting off of subordination to religion, the court and the nobility, an excessively demanding cultural patronage or, sometimes, the state. This was emblematically the case for Mozart. In his “Sociology of a Genius”, Norbert Elias (1993) showed how the use of subscriptions and concerts allowed the young composer and musician to move beyond the dictates of noble patrons. But while Beethoven (Bourdieu 2001; DeNora 1995), later on, succeeded in becoming an “entrepreneurial artist”, the musical market was, in Mozart’s time, in its early stages, which, paradoxically, both drove Mozart’s prodigious productivity and probably explains his premature death. Svetlana Alpers (1991) also highlighted the constitutive role market mechanisms can play for artistic creation, by showing how the division of labour in Rembrandt’s studio simultaneously reflected and shaped the creation of the market while sustaining the production of art and the reputation of the master. As a sort of response to Theodor Adorno, Edgar Morin (1961) described how, in the “cultural industries” (specifically in cinema), standardised cultural goods are produced by various categories of actors who thereby contribute to the creation of a new worldwide public.
The dissemination of artworks requires, as Antoine Hennion (1993) has argued, numerous “mediators”, including technological and commercial actors: for example, it is not despite but thanks to the modern phonographic industry that a stance of “pure” listening, centred on the appreciation of music for itself, was made possible by the opportunity given to individuals to buy, listen to and compare several versions of the same piece of music at home (Hennion et al. 2000).2 From a sociological perspective, the market cannot be conceived solely as a set of economic exchanges responding to the interplay of offer and demand. Indeed, the market constitutes a broader social structure, a vast network of human and non-human actors mobilising numerous material devices and collectively elaborated representations and practices (Callon 2017). Art markets are no exception, and often express more vividly the characteristics and contradictions of the market logic.
For some decades now, certain sociological analyses have brought to light the consequences of that porosity between art and markets for artists’ career paths. In its way, the “art world” model of Howard Becker (1982) is an affirmation that art, just like every other occupational sector, is formed by collaborative chains of various actors interacting together with shared conventions of production that do not exclude the “social drama of work”, for example, a disagreement about how things should be done according to one’s position in the chain of production and consumption (Hughes 1996). Following Howard Becker’s premise, authors like Pierre-Michel Menger (2002) have stressed that the artist is a “worker” like any other professional, who has to organise herself or himself as an entrepreneur, for example, by selling his or her artwork and/or holding multiple jobs within or outside the field of art. From a broader perspective , Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) have shown how the mainstream capitalist economy has integrated the “artist critique” to managerial injunctions requiring professionals to be “creative” but also flexible risk-takers in the face of the precariousness of the labour market. In the last twenty years or so, the arts have increasingly been discussed as being part of the “cultural industries” or, more largely, the “creative economy” and thus an important area for economic and cultural development.3
Historical and contemporary relations between the arts and markets are highly complex...