International Fame, Success and Consecration in the Visual Arts

Abstract

The present contribution consists in an analysis of two indigenous rankings of the contemporary art world, the Kunstkompass and the Artfacts ranking, which try to objectivize the visibility of living contemporary artists. Both indicators are used in order to illustrate the impact of nationality and country of residence on the success of contemporary artists. Apart from the fact that the Kunstkompass presents a bias that benefits German artists, those indicators, although their methodologies are very distinct, show very similar results.

Although the ideology of globalization through the mixing of different cultures and the alleged erasure of national borders has been very popular in the contemporary art world for about two decades, and even if most actors of the art world love to believe that nationality, country or place of residence do not matter, our analysis tends to unveil a very different reality. The international contemporary art world remains very territorialized and hierarchized in terms of countries. No actual globalization exists in the contemporary art world if one understands the term in the sense that all parts of the world should be concerned and that fluxes should not be affected by uneven exchanges and by domination effects. Empirical survey shows that the contemporary art world mostly covers a very limited number of Western countries, among which Germany and even more the USA play an absolutely central role.