Philosophic Money. The Contemporary Art System as a Market and Cultural Agent

Abstract

Within the contemporary art system complex, constantly-changing cultural features coexist with stratified acts of dealing. The art market operates as a collective mediation structure, developing a multiple agency: financial and economic, educational, political and social. In this article, we offer the result of an empirical test dedicated to the identification of unseen changes in the informal organizational pattern of the market. Observing the behavior of selected samples, we focused, firstly, on the networks of artists and commercial galleries at the Art Basel fair; and, secondly, on the group and solo shows organized by a relevant sample of international contemporary art museums and exhibitions spaces. These analyses offer an insight into the changes that occurred from 2005 to 2013, encompassing the quantitative growth of the art system infrastructure and the effects of the crisis of 2008.

1. Premises

Complexity is a structural predicate of the contemporary art system (Danto 1964; Dickie 2000).1 Its elusive character evades efforts to provide a single definition and challenges most attempts to outline a clear and stable picture.

The contemporary art system is also a market, and since the 1970s2 it has been studied as such by a large number of scholars. A great many agents operate in this market, encompassing a wide range of activities that support a fast-growing and progressively globalized trade in artworks. It is a market that has proved capable of bringing significant flows of capital from the financial market into the art world as an alternative form of investment (Pesando 1993; Mei and Moses 2002; Renneboog and Spaenjers 2013). It is a market in which the supply chain currently offers a large and ever-increasing variety of goods: paintings, sculptures, drawings, writings, books, prints, photos, videos, performances, memories and archives, relics, and objects of various kinds. As in many other markets, its trade activities respond to different needs and consumer behaviors: symbolic capital acquisition, financial risk hedging, cultural or aesthetic passion, pleasure, and political activism (Bourdieu [1979] 1984).

A quick glance at the last two decades clearly indicates that one of the most impressive features of the contemporary art system is its quantitative growth. This dynamic can be easily detected looking at the market dimension of the system. In 2000, there were approximately 55 established international art fairs while in 2018 there were close to 300 of them (Baia Curioni 2012; McAndrews 2018, 2019). In the same year, the overall value of sales was estimated to have reached 16.5 billion dollars.

Auction sales tripled from 2000 to 2007, reaching 33 billion dollars before the reduction in activity following the 2008 crisis. In 2018, the overall volume was 29 billion dollars, driven in particular by the high end of the market featuring works priced at over 10 million. The fast-growing online market reached an estimated 6 billion dollars and an average 11% growth in six years. The global exchanges recorded in 2018 amounted to 67.4 billion dollars, with an advanced sales value of 9% in 10 years and 40 million in transactions. An impressive 310,000 businesses are estimated to operate in the art market, employing close to 3 million people, with a 20 billion turnover and 375,000 additional jobs in external support (McAndrews 2019) but this expansion is not only happening in the market infrastructure. The large number of Contemporary Art Museums that have been built and opened since the beginning of the 1990s—a number that strongly increased in the early 2000s3—shows how the growth involved the overall structures of the contemporary art world. Quantity is not quality, but a quantitative shift of this size needs to be understood not only as a mere infrastructural transformation but also as a cultural challenge. This seems particularly true considering that the art market is a peculiar kind of market: a market that participates in a system that transforms the very nature and function of the object being traded. We are not referring here to the Marxian notion of use value as opposed to exchange value, which is the transformative function of every market even if very narrowly defined (Adorno [1938] 2002), but rather to the art market’s capacity to change the intimate cultural nature of goods altogether through the acts of selling and appreciating them (Moulin [1967] 1989, p. 12).4 The relation is bidirectional: the late 20th-century art history shows that everything, every good and every tangible formal representation can be considered an artwork if placed in the right context of narrative and institutions.

Symmetrically, anthropologists tell us that every artwork, even the holiest and most representative, can potentially acquire the status of a mere commodity, whether temporarily or permanently (Appadurai 1986). The results of many different top-end auctions offer a clear example of this trajectory: the artworks, even the rarest and the most celebrated become commodities traded for sound and often—though not always—legitimate speculative reasons, without necessarily losing their auratic dimension (Benjamin 2013).5 Beyond the rhetoric of the so-called “genius”6 and even beyond the significance established by art historians, the hammered prices of artworks may rise on the basis of perfectly cynical and narrow financial strategies (Thompson 2008), or as the result of calculated strategies of symbolic capital acquisition (Bourdieu [1979] 1984). In this game, the prices themselves and their dynamics are part of the prestige and symbolic life of the artwork and thereby acquire specific cultural meanings (Velthuis 2003).

These figures and their implications have been scrutinized and discussed quite often. The tension between the fragile meaningfulness of individual art practices and the “arbitrariness” of a volatile, powerful, and collective market represents a conundrum to be debated over the last 50 years and a challenging topic for art historians.

The work of an artist cannot be conceived as a “standard” market-oriented practice (Bourdieu 1996).7 At the same time, the market dimension of the art system seems to maintain a specific cultural role which is not only due to its significant influence on the artists’ careers and on their capacity to sustain their professional choices. The market dimension produces specific narratives and may also influence the behavior of art institutions (like museums and art schools).

In this article, we assume that this tension—and the way in which it has been conceptualized—offers a fertile point of view for interpreting the history of the so-called contemporary art system: a history of the ideological and organizational way in which the hyper-mobilized civilization of the 20th century included, and somehow also neutralized, the “revolutionary” independence of poetic knowledge.

We decided to focus our attention on a specific, globalized, segment of the market dimension of the system, in order to offer an evidence-based contribution on its behaviors. At the same time, we considered the “art market” in a perspective that encompasses the economic and the cultural dimension of the exchanges.

A multiplicity of imaginaries and functions coexisting within the same act of dealing is nothing new for art historians and social scientists, and it is certainly not a characteristic exclusive to contemporary art markets.8 The linguistic and symbolic dimension of human agency gives rise to the possibility that any act of mediation implies representation and interpretation and, therefore, the transformation of the object, with the latter potentially acquiring different meanings in different contexts and formats of perception.

What is interesting from our perspective is the process through which this cultural and transformative function of the contemporary art system and market is institutionalized, and how its trajectory may be changing. The art system’s agency, unfolding as a mediating practice9 enforced by specific institutional frameworks, exceeds the traditional economic definition of markets10 and paves the way for extending the very concept and function of markets beyond their agency centered on dealing and the efficient allocation of resources.

The art system can be studied as a market, cultural engine, and civilizational attractor.11 The coexistence of these dimensions is a core feature that is reflected in the social agency of art practices and in the overall social relevance of the arts.

2. The Art Market and Its Multiple Agencies

To understand an extremely large and complex social phenomenon such as the art system, it proves useful to adopt a practice-based perspective (Nicolini 2012) in which social phenomena are conceived as routinized performances mobilizing the bodily, social, discursive, and material dimensions (Nicolini 2017).

By approaching it as a constellation of practices, defined as “regimes of a mediated object-oriented performance of organized sets of sayings and doings” (Nicolini 2017, p. 21), it is possible to assess and describe its features in a processual and multi-layered way and, in the same vein, to advocate for a processual and performative understanding of institutional and organizational phenomena (Czarniawska 2014). Keeping with this perspective, we observed the patterns of forms of agency that make up the art system, offering a possible and emergent description of it rather than proposing an ex ante definition based on the above-mentioned traditional dualism between market-oriented and cultural-oriented views of the system.

The type of work enacted through this agency, producing and reproducing the system, could be conceptualized as a part of the cultural public sphere, as a component of the educational sphere, or as a part of the economic and financial sphere (See Figure 1).

The coexistence of these different layers is crucial for the reproduction of contemporary art in modern societies. Although the various stakeholders may perceive only a limited number of these facets, their entanglement defines and frames the legitimacy of the experience and practice of art in contemporary societies.

Keeping with this perspective, we introduce here the idea of viewing the system as a bundle of agencies and practices. We offer a possible preliminary classification of the system, that is, we approach it with a view to scaling down its complexity.

Secondly, we present in the following part of the essay the results of a longitudinal study exploring some of the microstructures—conceived as repeated organizational patterns—that support the reproduction of this multi-layered set of features focusing on the relationships between market institutions and museums.

3. Is the Role of Art Market Changing?

The overall contemporary dimensions of the art world and its relatively fast growth since the early 2000s represent an unprecedented historic innovation. Some scholars see this quantitative dynamic as the frame in which an organizational transition is taking place, with the dealer–collector relationship displacing the dealer–critic one as the prevailing form evaluating contemporary artworks and artists.12

The consequences of this transition seem to be significant in that the dealers/collectors pairing suggests the image of an art world essentially dominated by market-driven choices that take the place of theoretical, curatorial, and art historical appraisals of artworks.13

Significantly enough, Seth Siegelaub, one of the most relevant and creative representatives of art marketing practices in the New York scene during the 1970s, organized his last provocation at Art Basel 2013 by vigorously questioning the integrity of the art system as a field of cultural production.14

In this paper, considering the complexity and stratification of the art system, we develop the hypothesis that over the past few years the system has operated through dealer–critic and dealer–collector relationships simultaneously, without being dominated by a specific pattern.

The informative “smallness” of the art system implies continuous contact and information flows among actors operating at different levels. At the same time, the hierarchical structure of the system implies that there are deep informational asymmetries between actors.

What we try to show is that the main line of tension is therefore between insiders and outsiders—as defined by Kindleberger (1991)—or, more precisely, between different categories of insiders and outsiders operating in the system. Each of these categories includes collectors, artists, gallerists, dealers, and institutions with both dealing and cultural roles.

Their game is informal; it is comprised of professional credibility, financial interests, friendships, alliances, marriages, tacit knowledge, social status, tastes, and habitus that together give rise to a multidimensional network of volatile and interconnected practices. Within this loose-knit network, a few stable relational and organizational forms can be identified. Their function is to offer stability and resilience to the system as a whole while at the same time regulating and exploiting the differences among actors and between sets of available information.15

However, these informal organizational patterns do not necessarily remain the same over time. Exogenous shocks—such as the dimensional growth of the system or the consequences of a global financial crisis—might produce unforeseen changes, eventually transforming not only the system’s market practices but its overall forms of agency and, therefore, the ultimate meaning of art practices in our societies.

4. Materials and Methods

The research presented in this article is designed in an attempt to address some of these questions by constructing and assembling different databases. The first such database charts the galleries and artists that showed at Art Basel in the eight years from 2005 to 201316; the second includes the activities (collective and solo exhibits) of 35 contemporary international art museums and exhibition spaces in the same span of years17; and a third outlines the auction prices of a selected set of artists from 2005 to 2019.18

These sets of information allow us to take an initial empirical and descriptive look at some common, stable organizational structures, focusing in particular on the behaviors of galleries and museums.

More precisely, we decided to follow up on some of the choices made by a specific set of world galleries—the ones included in the Art Basel fair from 2005 to 2013—and to use the choices made by a sample of contemporary international art museums during the same time period as a control group. Using the information offered by the Art Basel fair, we collected the names and demographic data of all the artists that exhibited at the fair. Through the websites, we collected information about all the group and solo exhibitions curated by each museum included in the sample.

We focused on the behaviors of galleries and museums in order to understand if and how the quantitative shock of the last 20 years has produced a detectable change in the art system’s informal but stable constituencies, and in what direction.

The choice of the time span (2005–2013) allows us to consider four years of infrastructural market growth (2005–2008) and five years (2009–2013) in which the system reacted to the massive 2008 financial crisis, eventually recovering from its main short-term effects.

Our empirical observation was divided into three parts.

• In the first, we considered the world of galleries, identifying regular patterns in their operations.
• In the second, we concentrated on museums, looking at the specific features of their behavior.
• In the third, we focused on some overlaps and interactions between these two different institutions.
• In the conclusion, we present and discuss the empirical evidence collected.

5. The Art Basel Galleries

Galleries act as market agents even if they are not pure dealing agents. Galleries represent specific artists, promote and sell their works through exhibits, catalogs, events, and often operate as trustworthy advisors for important collectors. The definition of gallery encompasses institutions that vary greatly in terms of dimensions, centrality, and financial and organizational capacities. One of the most striking trends in recent years is the tendency for galleries to become polarized, with a small number of huge, multinational, primary, and secondary market galleries (such as Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth) on one side and all the rest on the other side. The rest are composed of international or national small to medium-sized galleries. The distinction between secondary and primary market galleries that used to be important is now much less clear-cut. With few exceptions, galleries are relatively small firms and represent a limited number of artists in a primary and secondary market perspective. Their sustainability is based on a combination of short-term operations (selling artworks to cover the company’s upfront costs) and medium long-term operations (sustaining, controlling, and increasing the artists’ value and status). There is a high level of investment and sunk costs for each artist included in each gallery roster, and galleries thus tend to concentrate on a relatively small number of trusted relationships with artists.

Art Basel is the most well-established contemporary art fair at the global level and over the last 20 years was the fair that attracted the wealthiest collectors, representing an opportunity for participating galleries to cover a significant part (from the 30% to the 50%) of their annual sales. This is why a large number of galleries apply for admission each year, giving rise to lengthy waiting lists. A small number of galleries that are already members decide on admission through a co-optative mechanism. Although the member galleries do employ different strategies, a common feature in Basel is that the artworks exhibited there are the ones with the best chances of being sold.

In order to develop an overview of the galleries’ behaviors, we decided to consider the panel of all the galleries admitted to Basel from 2005 to 2013.

Table 1. Number and rotation of galleries at the Art Basel fair.

Galleries	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013
Number	256	280	288	291	289	285	287	284	284
% Variation	-	9%	3%	1%	−1%	−1%	1%	−1%	0%
In 1	-	49	43	46	45	40	47	44	41
Out 2	-	25	35	43	47	44	45	47	41
Rotation 3	-	29%	28%	31%	32%	29%	32%	32%	29%

¹ The galleries that did not take part in the fair the year before. ² Galleries that were in the fair the year before and are not listed in the year in question. ³ Rotation is the overall mobility ratio: (Incoming + Outgoing)/Total galleries.

provides a clear picture of the population of galleries admitted to Basel in the period under consideration (2005–2013).

The overall distribution of incoming and outgoing galleries is stable as is the overall rotation of the group.

Of the 508 galleries admitted during these nine years, 191 (38%) were stable participants in the fair (eight or nine times) while 96 (19%) were admitted for only one year.19 The number of galleries that are admitted for only one year remains stable over time (

Table 2. Number of galleries admitted to Art Basel for only one year.

Galleries	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013
In/Out 1 year	-	12	11	19	13	11	16	14	-
Percentage	-	4%	4%	7%	4%	4%	6%	5%	-
All	256	280	288	291	289	285	287	284	284

).

As shown in

Table 3. Number of artists at the Art Basel fair.

Artists	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013
Number	2966	3313	3338	3748	3883	3810	3944	4037	4093
% Variation	-	12%	1%	12%	4%	−2%	4%	2%	1%
Incoming 1	-	825	668	987	828	623	770	798	707
Outgoing 2	-	478	643	577	693	696	636	705	651
Rotation 3	-	39%	39%	42%	39%	35%	36%	37%	33%

¹ Artists that were not included in the fair list the year before. ² Artists that were in the fair the year before and are not listed in the year in question. ³ Rotation is the overall mobility ratio: (Incoming + Outgoing)/Total artists.

, the number of artists included in the Art Basel galleries’ roster increased significantly in 2006 and 2008 before stabilizing, and the overall rotation of artists (number of new incoming and old outgoing) tended to decrease in the last part of the period.

Considering only the 155 galleries that were admitted for all nine years—the ones that make up the true backbone of the fair—the artists that were included in more than 10 rosters are eight highly-established names, among whom Andy Warhol has maintained a dominant position (

Table 4. Artists included in at least 10 rosters of the stable galleries (included for nine years).

Artists	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013
Andy Warhol	22	21	22	23	24	21	21	18	19
Picasso	17	15	17	14	15	13	14	15	14
Sol LeWitt	12	16	13	11	14	13	14	14	13
Alexander Calder	13	12	14	11	12	13	12	13	14
Lucio Fontana	11	12	13	14	11	10	13	12	11
Joan Miró	12	11	12	11	12	12	12	10	10
Jean Dubuffet	12	13	11	9	9	10	12	12	13
Donald Judd	10	9	9	12	13	12	14	12	10

).

A stable cohort of artists that appeared in the art fair’s rosters at least for seven years out of the nine possible years (48% of the total, see

Table 5. Artists’ inclusion in the galleries’ rosters.

From 7 (included) to 9 years	1899	48%
From 3 (included) to 7 years	1121	28%
Fewer than 3 years	976	24%
Total	3996	100%

) surrounds this core group.

There were only 976 artists who appeared only one or two years (24% of the total). These figures indicate that the stable galleries representing the “structural backbone” of the fair from 2005 to 2013 concentrate their actions on the same group of 1900 artists. Only 24% of their portfolios vary more widely in terms of artists on offer.

Another relevant finding is that, if an artist is included in more than two rosters, his or her ability to remain at Basel for a longer time changes: 95% of the artists included in two or more rosters show a duration of seven to nine years. This percentage falls to 39% for those who were represented by an average of fewer than two galleries. The interpretation of these figures is not univocal: Basel is a highly-selective environment, and once an artist has been included and shown, the gallery environments tend to keep him or her for many years.20

This tendency toward a stable set of artists increased after the 2008 financial crisis. We calculated the portfolio rotation21 of the Basel galleries considering the artists that are eliminated and the ones that are included in each roster and found that this index decreased after 2008 (Figure 2).

After the financial crisis, the galleries apparently concentrated on the same artists they had presented at previous editions of the fair, reducing the number of changes. This attitude indicates a risk reduction strategy adopted widely among the Basel galleries (as indicated by the reduction of the standard deviation of the rotation).

6. Contemporary Art Museums and Exhibition Spaces

Museums work as cultural agents. They operate by acquiring and preserving collections, through research and publishing, and by mobilizing different audiences and media outlets (events, online platforms, exhibits, talks, educational programs, zines, etc.). Their purposes might vary depending on the founders’ mission statements.

From a market perspective, their sets of actions might be compared to that of “rating” agencies: acquisition by a museum or exhibition in a solo or collective show can be considered a sign of reputation-building for an artist and his or her works.

For our research, we selected a sample of 35 contemporary art museums and exhibition spaces operating in 15 nations, listed in

Table 6. Contemporary art museums and exhibition spaces in our sample.

Museums	Country	Artists	Group Shows	Solo Shows	% Solo Shows
Mumok	Austria	483	629	51	8%
MuHKA	Belgium	558	664	28	4%
MAC Niterói	Brazil	65	35	34	49%
MAM São Paulo	Brazil	100	80	31	28%
RAM	China	46	41	5	11%
UCCA	China	564	566	63	10%
MSU Zagreb	Croatia	692	876	63	7%
Kiasma	Finland	319	330	25	7%
Centre Pompidou	France	912	1214	100	8%
MAC Lyon	France	398	395	39	9%
Frankfurter Kunstverein	Germany	439	431	30	7%
Fridericianum (Documenta)	Germany	291	295	1	0%
Hamburger Bahnhof	Germany	216	256	48	16%
Kunst-Werke	Germany	816	935	29	3%
Ludwig	Germany	570	704	42	6%
IMMA	Ireland	408	520	84	14%
Castello di Rivoli	Italy	325	442	30	6%
MAMbo	Italy	343	360	44	11%
MART	Italy	481	568	58	9%
Mori Art Museum	Japan	687	716	27	4%
MUAC	Mexico	266	270	38	12%
Stedeljik	Netherlands	416	452	61	12%
Witte de Width	Netherlands	216	199	32	14%
MACBA	Spain	380	512	52	9%
MNCARS	Spain	1010	1047	135	11%
Magasin III	Sweden	183	207	29	12%
Moderna Museet	Sweden	717	758	113	13%
Kunsthalle Zürich	Switzerland	64	32	39	55%
Baltic	U.K.	247	160	110	41%
Tate Modern	U.K.	419	373	101	21%
LACMA	USA	198	171	45	21%
MCA Chicago	USA	697	841	131	13%
New Museum	USA	606	646	51	7%
PS1	USA	865	915	90	9%
SFMOMA	USA	323	307	89	22%
Total		15,3201	16,947	1948	14%

¹ There are 9005 artists in the museum dataset, but many of them are exhibited at more than one institution.

.

The star system has a perceptible influence on the museum environment, and indeed the 10 most-exhibited artists of the period are shown in

Table 7. Most-exhibited artists.

Artist	No. Shows
Andy Warhol	30
Bruce Nauman	25
Jeff Koons	23
Lawrence Weiner	21
Paul Klee	19
Gerhard Richter	18
Thomas Ruff	18
Cindy Sherman	18
Francis Alÿs	17
John Baldessari	17
Marcel Duchamp	17

.22

Andy Warhol is the leading star of these nine years for both galleries and museums.

At the same time, 74.1% of the sample only appeared once in the nine years while only 4.1% was shown more than six times (

Table 8. Artists and number of exhibitions.

Number of Exhibitions	Number of Artists	Percentage
More than 10	75	0.8%
From 6 to 10	299	3.3%
From 2 to 5	1966	21.8%
1 Exhibition	6665	74.1%
Total artists	9005	100.0%

).

This finding, almost the opposite of the data collected for galleries (see Table 5 above), indicates that the exhibition choices of each individual museum are largely independent of the choices made by other museums, which is consistent with the promotional and cultural role these institutions play.

7. Galleries and Museums: Independence and Relationships

The boundaries between the practices of galleries and those of museums have been fading since the evolution of so-called “primary market” galleries in the 1970s. The growing size and role of the market in the last 25 years, and the growing demand for artworks and art in general, has reduced incentives to maintain a long-term, faithful relationship between artists, galleries, and museums. The increasing role of the economic side of the art agency operates as a tool for the progressive mobilization of the art system in a process that is consistent with increasing liquidity and relational fluidity.

Is this dynamic really being acted out? Are the roles of both galleries and museums actually on the verge of a profound change? Is it possible to empirically describe the dynamics being played out in the core of art market structures?

In 2015, The Art Newspaper openly questioned museums’ relative independence from the seductions of the market: “Nearly one-third of the major solo exhibitions held in US museums between 2007 and 2013 featured artists represented by just five galleries, according to research conducted by The Art Newspaper. We analyzed nearly 600 exhibitions submitted by 68 museums for our annual attendance-figures survey and found that 30% of prominent solo shows featured artists represented by Gagosian Gallery, Pace, Marian Goodman Gallery, David Zwirner, and Hauser & Wirth” (Halperin 2015).

In the next section, we develop two empirical tests that offer an evidence-based perspective on the issue.

7.1. Independence

One initial descriptive analysis considering the overlap between the museums and the Art Basel galleries portfolio of artists indicates a consistent degree of independence between the two groups of institutions.

The overall sample is composed of 13,298 artists, 7315 appearing at Basel from 2005 to 2013, and 9005 exhibited in the same years by the selected sample of 35 contemporary art museums and exhibition spaces (Figure 3).

A total of 3022 artists appeared in both samples, 41% of all those exhibited at Basel, and 31% of those exhibited in the museums.

Of the artists exhibited in the selected museums and spaces, 66% are not included in Basel, thus confirming the museums’ independence from the fair system.

A further test carried out on the museum sample and a group of 52 selected Basel galleries23 supports the description above and shows that the two groups not only seem to act independently but also operate through different networking structures.24

• The museum–artist network is characterized by a higher level of degree centrality and a lower betweenness for the exhibited artists: this implies that each artist has relationships with a larger number of colleagues in the museum world and that each museum tends to privilege different clusters of artists.
• The gallery–artist network displays a contrasting structure: a lower degree and higher level of betweenness. This indicates that the galleries operate on smaller but more similar groups of artists.

The differences in the networking structures reveal that the two groups of institutions played diverse roles and maintained different relationships with the population of artists during the nine years under observation: the galleries, acting according to a dealing perspective, operated with fewer artists and on an overall more similar and limited group of artists, characterized by a higher market profile. The museums worked with a wider set of artists and according to a much more independent perspective.

Given these findings, market and cultural roles seem to be distinct.

7.2. Connections

Considering the museums’ exhibitions, it is important to distinguish between solo and group shows. The first are monographic, dedicated to a single artist as a tribute to his or her career or to welcome a promising newcomer. These shows involve a specific investment of curatorial labor and funds for the institutions and represent a critical statement about the work of an artist. The second, group shows, are also important reputational signals for the artists involved but they are collective exhibitions, sometimes characterized by a specific theme, and artists might be included for various reasons.

It is interesting to observe that from 2005 to 2013, 29% of the Basel artists (878) were included in the solo shows produced by the museums. If we look at the general museum sample, only 17% of the artists had a solo show (Figure 4).

Although the action of museums generally seems to be independent of market signals, the artists who were included at Basel received significantly greater attention from the museums. This overlap requires further investigation. Is this a sign that galleries use the curatorial choices of museums as a point of reference? Or the opposite? Is it a matter of combined attention from both the institutions converging on a given artist?

7.3. Further In-Depth Inquiry

The last test that we conducted considered a specific sub-sample of artists, all those that have been included in the galleries’ rosters after 2008. This is a group of 75 newcomers: 64 of them selected by at least one of the 155 stable Basel galleries and 11 only selected by other, less-stable Basel galleries.

For all of these artists, we considered the operations carried out by the sample of museums and charted the progression of auction prices from 2005 to 2019, looking in particular at the level of market “liquidity” calculated as total auction turnover for each year and artist.

These are the main findings:

• Auction liquidity for this group of artists rose significantly after 2013, with a total turnover of 107.1 Million dollars from 2013 to 2019 (Figure 5).
• Before their inclusion at Basel, 19 artists were exchanged, with an average yearly turnover of 180,976 dollars. After their inclusion, the number of artists with auction sales rose to 37 up to 2013 and then to 57 since 2014, with an average yearly turnover of 313,096 dollars (a 73% increase).25 This is a group of young newcomers to the market who were been included in the Art Basel roster after 2008 and increased their overall market value after 2013.
• Museums have a significant presence in relation to this group of artists: 55 of them (73%) were exhibited in a museum between 2005–2013 (as compared to an average of 41% of the total number of Basel artists, see Figure 3). Moreover, 24 of them (32%) were given solo shows, as compared to an average of 29% (see Figure 4). The stable Basel galleries represented 22 of them. This tells us that the action of museums mainly overlaps with the action of a specific group of insiders, represented by the stable Art Basel galleries.
• The auction liquidity of the artists featured in solo shows is 1,279,000 dollars as compared to an average of 647,000 dollars, and an average of 64,000 for the artists who were not included in any museum exhibitions.26 This means that museum exhibitions, and especially solo shows, have an impact on auction prices.
• The last significant finding is that the action of galleries follows in the footsteps of museums: 16 cases out of the 23 characterized by a solo show indicate that the museums’ activities anticipated the galleries’ commercial intentions to deal in that artist’s work. This evidence suggests that cultural and dealing features may be closely connected in terms of sequence, but they are nonetheless organized with curatorial evaluations prevailing over dealing practices.

8. Main Findings and Limitations

In this article, we focus our attention on the systemic dimension of the contemporary art market, in order to offer an evidence-based contribution on its behaviors, while simultaneously considering it in a perspective that encompasses the economic and the cultural dimension of the exchanges. We thus first offered a comprehensive overview of the art system as both an economic and a cultural environment. The economic vs. cultural binary conceptualization is at once simplistic in theoretical terms and difficult to operationalize from an empirical point of view; in this paper, we suggest that, in order to overcome these limits, it would be fruitful to begin by following action nets (Czarniawska 2004) so as to observe the features of the system as emerging from this temporary state of stabilization. Organized around three main spheres of action and meaning—cultural and public, educational, economic, and financial—the system unfolds as a bundle of different forms of agency.

In the central section of the article, the empirical analysis, we focused on two databases of information collected regarding Art Basel galleries and a sample of contemporary art museums and exhibition spaces selected from around the world. This analysis identified a stable informal pattern of organizational choices that differentiates the sets of actions of the two institutional groups, museums and galleries; that is to say, patterns of choices distinguish the role of “cultural legitimation” from the commercial perspective.

In the last part of the article, considering a group of artists selected by these galleries in and after 2008, we noted an intense overlapping of action between the two groups of institutions. In reacting to the 2008 crisis, the most important Art Basel galleries intensified their focus on new artists and looked attentively at the choices made by the group of museums under consideration here. We also found that the connection between these two institutional groups has a recognizably positive effect on the overall auction liquidity of the artists included in the sample.

The consistency between these two categories and the financial impact of such consistency does not affect the signaling and cultural role played by museums, and indeed moves by museums seem to anticipate both the galleries’ choices and the auction liquidity of the artists.

In spite of the system’s infrastructural expansion and the crisis of 2008, our analysis did not find evidence of a change in the informal organizational pattern of the art system.

The fact that we also found two artists who display intense auction liquidity and gallery presence that is not echoed by shows in the selected group of museums indicates that some artists may have dealer-led careers, as a relatively minor option.

The main limitations of our findings stem from our choice to develop an initial empirical overview and have to do with different issues. One is related to the sources: the Art Basel sample reflects a very specific gallery environment, while the sample of museums is quantitatively limited. The second order of limitation is methodological, suggesting that our findings could be productively supplemented by further qualitative inquiries. For example, the positive sequence “museum–gallery” empirically identified here needs to be reconsidered by looking at the complex set of relationships that may connect the work of gallerists to collectors, curators, and museums. Such informal relationships do not necessarily leave behind evidence that is explicit and easy to trace.

Further research is needed to build on this classification of the art system’s forms of agency. The most fruitful way to pursue such research would be through qualitative analyses, either focusing on specific artworks or following the network of practices at play in specific environments.