Abstract
A key concern in the globalization of culture debate has been how growing cross-border flows affect asymmetries among cultural producers from different world regions. Existing contributions are polarized between the declaration of radical shifts or the unchallenged reproduction of center–periphery hierarchies. This chapter establishes an intermediate, transformational position that moves beyond dichotomous alternatives. Engaging with contemporary visual art and extending tools of field theory, I demonstrate that transformations of center–periphery hierarchies have occurred, but follow different temporalities and logics at the market and cultural pole. Correspondingly, I make the case for a multidimensional global field approach that accounts for three features of center–periphery inequalities in global cultural production: the relative autonomy of non-market from market circuits, their cyclical nature, and their embeddedness in asymmetric interdependencies.
Special thanks for comments on earlier versions of this chapter go to Gil Eyal, Erkki Sevänen, Victoria Alexander, Debra Minkoff, and Ulf Wuggenig, as well as to Estelle Lee and Claudia Fendian for their support as research assistants.
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Notes
- 1.
Sapiro (2010) has demonstrated the usefulness of this distinction for examining effects of globalization on diversity in the French and US American national book market, but has not extended its implications to an examination of center–periphery dynamics at the global level.
- 2.
Information on the database as provided in 2008 in an interview with a specialist working for Artprice .
- 3.
Artfacts assigns “exhibition points” on a multidimensional basis according to the logic of a weighted index for visibility and reputation, mainly considering: (a) the number of artists participating. It thereby assigns the following weighing of points: solo shows > duo shows > group shows; (b) the type of institution: public institutions with a permanent art collection (usually international art museums) > no permanent collection (such as contemporary art centers); (c) geographic location: capital cities with vast numbers of museums and galleries > small cities or towns; (d) the international reputation of other artists who participate in the exhibition. These dimensions are related in a series of equations for determining the weighed sum of an artist’s exhibition points, which yields a ranking of his or her international visibility. For a theoretical and methodological justification of this international reputation index, see Artfacts.net (2003).
- 4.
As the director of Artfacts underlined in an interview in Spring 2012, the index seeks to represent the evaluation of professional curators, that is, “the curator’s point of view,” and not the judgment of dealers. Thus, Artfacts deliberately excludes information on the market success of artists.
- 5.
In contrast to an alternative indicator for international artistic prestige (the Kunst-Kompass ranking), the Artfacts ranking seems a more reliable source. Instead of drawing from surveys of subjective judgments by art professionals (whose design may change over time, such as in the Kunst-Kompass ranking), the Artfacts list is derived from a set of objective algorithms that are deployed across all exhibitions and years in a consistent way. Thus, the data source offers a more reliable indicator of artistic recognition for analyzing trends over time. Another benefit is the relational logic of the database in the sense that artists are qualified by the status of the exhibitions, cities, other artists, and so on with which they become associated as well as by the strength of these relationships. Such a measurement logic does not only correspond with the relational perspective of the field approach (cf. Bourdieu 1996, 166–73); it also has been empirically validated for understanding “the dynamics of artistic prestige” at a more local level (De Nooy 2002).
- 6.
The sample included only living visual artists who were born in 1925 or after, corresponding to the birth year of Robert Rauschenberg, the oldest core member of Pop Art. This style was chosen as a reference point for defining the selection of artists because it represents a turning point for the historical emergence of “contemporary art” (cf. Crane 1987) as defined by Moulin (2003, 39).
- 7.
That was the maximum size that could be obtained for all age groups in both rankings. More specifically, as the Artprice’s base source for sampling contained only 500 ranked visual artists (modern and contemporary) for 2007, the youngest cohort that could be sampled reached the number of 40 artists only.
- 8.
In view of the relative position of artists from the United States, which changed from 38.5% to 33%, and from Germany, with an increase from 15.1% to 18.8%.
- 9.
Information about the geographic distribution of exhibitions of US American artists was derived from Artfacts , which lists for each artist the institutions and locations by year in which they have presented their work.
- 10.
In 2008, ten semi-structured phone interviews were conducted with directors or leading representatives of the group of art institutions in non-northwestern countries that exhibited US American artists in 2007. These art institutions were selected at random among the total of respective exhibition spaces. The interviewees included English-speaking art professionals in China, Estonia, Israel, Hungary, Singapore, Brazil, Poland, and South Korea. Each interview lasted at least half an hour.
- 11.
The prevalent emic term used was “international,” rather than global. The findings from the interviews suggest however equivalency with the way the term global is used in this contribution, namely as referring to a scale that is multicontinental, that is, covers several continents. For this territorial qualification of the concept “global,” see Held et al. (2003).
- 12.
The data are again derived from the documentation of exhibition activities and respective locations in the Artfacts database.
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Buchholz, L. (2018). Beyond Reproduction: Asymmetrical Interdependencies and the Transformation of Centers and Peripheries in the Globalizing Visual Arts. In: Alexander, V., Hägg, S., Häyrynen, S., Sevänen, E. (eds) Art and the Challenge of Markets Volume 1. Sociology of the Arts . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64586-5_10
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