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

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

Whips, Chains, and Books on Campus: How Emergent Organizations With Core Stigma Gain Official Recognition

This article explores how emergent organizations with core stigma manage stigma, and work toward official recognition. The qualitative research design used organizational constitutions, listserv communications, and interviews to examine officially-approved student organizations focused on kinky sexuality in U.S. universities. Our findings indicate (a) due process and impersonal evaluations enable official approval of emergent organizations, particularly if this focuses on operational concerns; (b) emergent organizations leverage credible social discourses, such as individual rights, to emphasize issues pertinent to approval bodies and mainstream throughout society; (c) organizations can strategically embrace stigma, entailing complex decisions about balancing revelation and concealment; and (d) organizational tactics shift depending on the maturity of the stigmatized issue, important because organizational stigma can be resilient and persistent despite organizational legitimacy. The article contributes to research on organizational management of stigma by examining how emergent organizations with core stigma manage stigma while moving from informal to official status