Art Investment Collections: A New Model for Museum Finance?

This article examines the conflicting views about whether to consider artwork as a financial asset and suggests a modified museum finance strategy that would not raise stakeholder concerns about selling art in the permanent collection. By encouraging museums to begin a separate investment collection, artworks may ethically be sold to generate operating or other expenses. This strategy brings up issues of governance, accountability, and conflicts of interest, but if done correctly, it could leverage the art market access of museums to create a hedge for other types of endowment assets, while still upholding museum association guidance that works in a museum’s permanent collection are never to be sold in order to fund operating expenses.LBJ School of Public Affair

Stigma Resistance through Body-in-Practice:Embodying Pride through Creative Mastery

Stigma, as a process of shame, fosters social exclusion and diminishes bodily competences. Thus, stigmatized consumers often turn to the marketplace for respite. Based on an ethnographic study of drag artists, this study proposes a new understanding of the body that emerges from the mastery of creative consumption practices to combat shame. We theorize a novel “body-in-practice” framework to examine how consumers transform from an imagined persona to an accomplished body to embody pride. Six novel stigma resistance strategies emerged—experimenting, guarding, risk-taking, spatial reconfiguring, self-affirming, and integrating. Body-in-practice thus explains how shame weakens, pride strengthens, emotions stabilize, and self-confidence grows. This research contributes by explaining the hard work of identity repair, exploring stigma resistance across safe and hostile social spaces, and highlighting the emancipatory potential of embodied mastery

Collectors, investors and speculators: gatekeeper use of audience categories in the art market

This research examines gatekeepers' categorization work to assess and sort audience members. Using a multi-sited ethnography and interpretivist qualitative lens, we explore how high-value art gallerists sort buyers via categories, but also encourage conformity with preferred audience categories, both for artistic consecration goals and to discourage disruptive speculation. Categories served as reference points, with preferred and problematic buyer categories providing a discursive socialization tool, but also informing gatekeeping strategies, for example, problematic behaviors and buyer categories led to value-protecting gatekeeping and exclusion, often justified in moral terms. Monitoring continued throughout the relationship, with decisions considered both fair and necessary for gallerists’ professional practice. Gatekeeping decisions included long-term temporal considerations, prompting strategies including ‘placement,’ monitoring and audience recategorization. This extends gatekeeping beyond simply passing muster at the ‘gate.’ We also illustrate the dynamic and fluid nature of hidden categories, which provide gatekeepers with heightened abilities to punish perceived wrongdoing

Uncertainty, strategic sensemaking and organisational failure in the art market: What went wrong with LVMH's investment in Phillips auctioneers?

Strategic decision-making in the volatile and uncertain art market is not only instigated by rational interpretation of the external environment, but also by expert-based intuition. This paper investigates organisational failure at Phillips auctioneers between 1999 and 2002, a period in which it was owned by the multinational luxury goods conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH). To analyse this case, we develop a conceptual framework for strategic sensemaking in art organisations that includes the processes of scanning, interpreting, strategising, acting and adjusting, which take place in non-linear and recursive patterns in supporting continuous loops of improvement. Our analysis identifies the merits of intuitive decision-making when realising a novel artistic and entrepreneurial vision which established Phillips as a boutique auction house. However, it also highlights the limitations of emotional and opportunistic decision-making which could lead to blinded management if any of the processes of strategic sensemaking is ignored.National Research Foundation of Kore

The Financialisation of the Art Market

London and New York are primary centres for both finance and the art market, indicating the continuing power of place. Both cities have become havens for wealth, wealth that has poured into the art market, and sometimes into the newer practices of art investment. Under what can be termed the financialisation of art, we can see the rise of a new industry sector that further knits together the art market and financial services, explaining the growth of art investment and its supporting industries, and highlight the enabling role of geographic location. Original article available at publisher's website: http://www.e-ir.info/2016/03/01/the-financialisation-of-the-art-market

Physical and Epistemic Objects in Museum Conservation Risk Management

This chapter highlights the paradoxical effects of increased price data in markets with difficult-to-value products where non-price factors are highly relevant. In the fine art market, the growth of market information providers facilitated access to auction price data, beneficial in a market noted for its clandestine dealings. Drawing from inductive ethnographic research, the paper notes complex outcomes from increased data availability, as auction prices can be seen as an indicator of an artwork’s value. The findings deconstruct factors of supply, demand and multiple prices in the art market, highlighting important non-price factors in valuation, which complicate provider claims of art market transparency. Unpacking the process through which expert “thick” valuation transforms raw price data into comparables and then valuations helps to explain continuing differences in valuation, with buyers prone to understand past prices as market or reference prices, rather than raw materials for valuation that are adjusted for complexity. This contributes to an understanding of both advantages and predictable problems from increased price data in markets that contain substantial qualitative and non-numerical data, as evaluative frictions can occur even in the absence of clearly defined alternative valuation methods. This develops productive linkages between critical transparency and the valuation and evaluation research

BOOK REVIEW: Beyond price: Value in culture, economics, and the arts

How is it that we can understand value in markets and society? As opposed to letting economists answer this question, there is now a growing interest in the social sciences on questions of value and valuation outside of economics, breaking down what David Stark has called ‘Parsons’ Pact,’ that economists study value, and sociologists—as an example here—study values. Michael Hutter and David Throsby’s Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics and the Arts provides an excellent challenge to this narrowing divide, contributing to an area of work that we might call valuation studies or the sociology of valuation

Hostile Worlds and Questionable Speculation: Recognizing the Plurality of Views About Art and the Market

The “hostile worlds” view argues that money corrupts the meaning of art, but some suggest this is a dated concept in describing the art market. Instead of dismissing this view, this paper argues that we need a typology of beliefs about art, money and commensuration; what could be understood as a pluralist understanding. Based on ethnographic research on the high-end contemporary art market in New York and London, I find that collectors, investors and art world experts often have different views about the relationship between art and money. This recognition is significant because art is a symbolic good with assigned, rather than intrinsic value, meaning that the value of art can be damaged for people holding hostile worlds views when the mechanisms that maintain the appropriate balance between art and money break down or are disregarded. In this sense, hostile worlds views create a performativity effect

Boundary Objects and the Technical Culture Divide: Successful Practices for Voluntary Innovation Teams Crossing Scientific and Professional Fields

This article examines the creation and stabilization of early-stage boundary objects by voluntary teams spanning divergent professional and scientific fields. Cross-disciplinary collaborators can share similar goals, yet nonetheless face frictions from differences in professional expertise, practices, and technical systems. Yet if boundary objects help to span disciplinary divides, the same challenges are likely to hinder initial boundary object development. Comparative ethnography of three projects adapting Grid computing technology to fields of science highlights challenges for boundary object creation, including a “mind-set shift” before the technology could stabilize. Enriching our knowledge of boundary object beginnings, we find successful stabilization requires both appropriate localization and further resources, which enable the simultaneously global–local nature of boundary objects. This essential feature is understudied in management research. Developing the boundary object concept on its own terms enhances empirical and theoretical application, particularly when researchers prefer one main theory of objects, rather than a “pluralist” approach