"Wir machen Kunst für Künstler": Lohnarbeit in Kunstmanufakturen; eine ethnografische Studie

Die Herstellung von Kunstwerken wird in jüngerer Zeit vermehrt aus dem Atelier in spezialisierte handwerkliche Produktionsstätten ausgelagert. Die hier tätigen "Art Fabricators" sind in der Regel namen- und gesichtslos auf der Hinterbühne der "Art World" mit ihrem handwerklichen Geschick, einem ausgeprägten Kunstverständnis und hohem Maß an Kreativität an der Hervorbringung von Kunstwerken aktiv beteiligt. Sie stehen im Zentrum dieser Studie. Mittels ethnografischer Feldforschungen bietet der Autor erstmals Einblicke in die Praxis sowie Produktionsbedingungen und -verhältnisse solcher Manufakturen. Dabei werden auch das besondere Berufsethos ihrer Mitarbeiter*innen sowie deren Selbst- und Rollenverhältnisse untersucht. Nicht zuletzt stellt sich aber auch die Frage, wie dieser Wandel in der Produktion von Kunstwerken die Vorstellung vom Künstler und von der Kunst selbst verändert

On the price of priceless goods. Sociological Observations on and around Art Basel

Today’s public discourse on art revolves around the price of these priceless goods and numbers function as ciphers for the collective representations of art and its status in late capitalist society. Highly contrary assessments as to how the prices for these goods can be found, depending on the perspective taken. While it may seem that optimal transparency exists with regard to the market and the setting of prices, thanks to commercial databases readily available to everyone, ethnographic field work presents quite a different view. A research group took the question on pricing to a particularly prominent institution of the art market, Art Basel, using a variety of methodological approaches such as qualitative interviews with gallerists, artists, Art Basel staff, curators, art advisors, art critics etc. In the interviews some unwritten rules for dealing with the pricing of works of art became apparent. Pricing in the field of art requires not just knowledge of the unwritten and often tabooed rules, but also an intuitive feeling for the game and the accompanying strategies. Our empirical findings confirm the existence of two different paradigms. One the one hand there is the image of pure market competition for singular goods with high prestige value. In this view, the pricing of art commodities seems determined in an ideal-typical manner by purely exogenous market-dynamic and competition-driven forces. On the other hand, the idea of a purely endogenous, “art-immanent” reading and appreciation of the intrinsic value of a concrete work of art is maintained, independently of its real or potential market value

Le Play : la méthode comparative au service d’une vision normative du monde social

Comparatisme et relativisme « Trois degrés d’élévation de pôle renversent toute la jurisprudence; un méridien décide de la vérité... » : voilà le relativisme sociologique avant la lettre exprimé par un auteur, Blaise Pascal, dont l’œuvre philosophique et scientifique semble pourtant être inspirée par des principes normatifs opposés à un tel relativisme. Dès l’émergence historique de la sociologie moderne vers la fin du XIXe siècle, le regard comparatif si intensément interlié avec le relativi..

The Artist is Absent: the Artist as Creativity Entrepreneur and Changes in Representation and Practices of "Art"

Currently, a small team based at the university of St Gallen is undertaking ethnographic field research centred around the subject "Artist entrepreneurs and art fabricators: practices and representations of fine art in the context of manufacturing". Based on qualitative research such as participatory observation in art manufactures, comprehending interviews with all participants, but also documentation of entire production processes, the study aims to explore this specific configuration of art production and its effects on changes in the perception and legitimisation of art. While conceptual innovation – the idea on which the artwork is based – continues to be the exclusive domain of the artist, material and technical innovation as part of the realisation of an artwork is increasingly outsourced from the artist's studio to art workshops run by invisible art service providers. More and more, there is a growing distance and expanding chain of events between the concept and its material implementation. These new relations of production around artistic goods raise fundamental questions about the understanding and the status of art, but also about pricing on the art market, where such hidden costs certainly have an impact on the high value of works such as those by Hirst or Koons

Art Unlimited? Dynamics and Paradoxes of a Globalizing Art World

Until recently still a blank spot on the world map of art, China today occupies one of the top positions in the rankings of the global art market and has moved into the center of the speculations and the covetousness of its protagonists. But what is really happening on the spot, beyond the ethnocentric distortions of the Western viewpoint? What social representations and uses of art can be identified? A research team from the University of St. Gallen has taken up such questions in an ethnographical field research project which enables the actors in this emergent and nonetheless already market-dominated art field to have their say

Regards sur la mondialisation

Depuis la fin des années 2000, le marché de l’art n’a pas seulement connu une expansion massive, il s’est également sensiblement mondialisé, eu égard aux acteurs et institutions concernées, mais aussi aux arts visuels contem­porains en eux-mêmes. Les acteurs occidentaux ont aujourd’hui les yeux braqués sur l’Asie et plus particulièrement sur la Chine, où la rapide croissance économique s’accompagne depuis une dizaine années d’un marché de l’art en pleine expansion. Au même moment, de nouveaux acteurs ayant récemment acquis du pouvoir et affirmant leurs propres exigences apparaissent sur ces marchés émergents. Cet article s’appuie sur les résultats d’une recherche ethnographique portant sur les positions et les points de vue des acteurs du monde de l’art sur place, leur regard sur les changements actuels, les pratiques concrètes du marché de l’art chinois et hongkongais, leurs formations socio-historiques respectives et leurs liens avec le monde de l’art occidental.The art market has not only expanded massively in volume since the end of the 2000s; it has become noticeably more globalized in regard to the actors and the institutions involved and to contemporary visual art itself. The attention of Western actors is today drawn particularly to Asia, and especially to China, whose rapidly growing economic power has been accompanied for a decade by a strongly expanding art market. At the same time, actors from the emerging markets arise with new power and their own demands. The paper is based on the results of an ethnographic research project, which focused on the positions and perspectives of the actors of the art world on the spot, their views on the current changes, the concrete practices in the Chinese and Hong Kong art markets respectively the art field in their specific socio-historical form and in their inter­weave­ment with the Western art world

Art Unlimited?

Until recently still a blank spot on the world map of art, China today occupies one of the top positions in the rankings of the global art market and has moved into the center of the speculations and the covetousness of its protagonists. But what is really happening on the spot, beyond the ethnocentric distortions of the Western viewpoint? What social representations and uses of art can be identified? A research team from the University of St. Gallen has taken up such questions in an ethnographical field research project which enables the actors in this emergent and nonetheless already market-dominated art field to have their say