When Art Meets Money

The Art Basel is more than just a fair in the commercial sense of the word, more than a temporally and spatially concentrated gathering of dealers offering their goods for sale to interested buyers. It is at the same time the site of a display of "holy" goods in the presence of thousands and thousands of believers, a pilgrim's goal for the ritualized adoration of modern and contemporary art. It is also, and for precisely this reason, the decisive witness of the upheaval marking a radical change in that relationship between "art" and "money" - with all the consequences, not least for the evaluation of what is to be regarded as genuine art. The present study, the result of several years of sociological field work, attempts to draw a picture of this change as perceived by the participants, the organizers of the fair, the gallerists, collectors, curators, art consultants and artists, as a central problem of the contemporary art scene. The authors, members of a research group of the University of St. Gallen, present in When Art meets Money a detailed study of the practice of the contemporary picture market, drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu's influential sociology of art.

A frank, provocative, and entirely unconventional look at two worlds in tandem--the realms of money and art. Profusely illustrated, the book investigates how money becomes (or is) artwork and how artwork comes to assume some of the characteristics of money. 9 color plates; 100 halftones.

Art and money have much in common. Both are spheres of social activity that carry symbolic values. A coin is simply a piece of metal, stamped with signs to give it symbolic meaning, to give it a value, a value that changes with the vicissitudes of its economic life, or, when no longer legal tender, with its life as a collectable. A painting is a piece of canvas, stretched on a frame to make it taut, which is then covered with pigment, brushed with an image, a sign that gives it value, a value that changes with the vicissitudes of its aesthetic and symbolic life, with its commodity value. Art and money come together whenever the values of both are exchanged within a market—in trade between artist and client/patron, between dealer and customer, between competitors for social authority. These relationships of art and money are examined by a number of writers from a variety of perspectives—from different periods in history, within different cultures, and engaging with different media of art—from Renaissance Italy to Pop Art and the recent flourishing of the art of Australian Aborigines, from critiques of the market and contemporary art to the funding of art education, from an examination of the values that are being bought and sold to ways for artists to avoid an over-engagement with the money economy, and finally the relationship between art, national identity and coinage.

The title of this book is intended to be an honest one, far from exaggerated phrases and empty meanings. Three words, a preposition, and a coordinating conjunction: ‘Topics on Art and Money’. A coordinating conjunction, not a subordinating one, since this book does not intend to express a hierarchical order. As all words united by a coordinating conjunction, this book intends to connect them. As simple as that. This book presents, through the chapters written by its authors, some of the ways in which Art and Money are linked. In order to observe this relationship, this book consists of authors whose analysis refers to political propaganda, historical events with artistic repercussions or strictly economic analysis of the art market, for example. “And” connects, “or” divides. This book not only presents a connection between Art and Money, but between academics from different fields and geographical areas. This humble book presents, precisely, how individuals from different specialties think of this relationship. It will appeal to academics dedicated to Arts Economics and Cultural Management, professionals from the art market/world with an interest in works of an academic nature, and general readers with an interest in this topic and a strong knowledge of Arts Economics.

Women, Art and Money in England establishes the importance of women artists' commercial dealings to their professional identities and reputations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Grounded in economic, social and art history, the book draws on and synthesises data from a broad range of documentary and archival sources to present a comprehensive history of women artists' professional status and business relationships within the complex and changing art market of late-Victorian England. By providing new insights into the routines and incomes of women artists, and the spaces where they created, exhibited and sold their art, this book challenges established ideas about what women had to do to be considered 'professional' artists. More important than a Royal Academy education or membership to exhibiting societies was a woman's ability to sell her work. This meant that women had strong incentive to paint in saleable, popular and 'middlebrow' genres, which reinforced prejudices towards women's 'naturally' inferior artistic ability – prejudices that continued far into the twentieth century. From shining a light on the difficult to trace pecuniary arrangements of little researched artists like Ethel Mortlock to offering new and direct comparisons between the incomes earned by male and female artists, and the genres, commissions and exhibitions that earned women the most money, Women, Art and Money is a timely contribution to the history of women's working lives that is relevant to a number of scholarly disciplines.

Offering a fresh perspective on a misunderstood eighteenth-century novelist, this study situates Tobias Smollett (1721-71) as the chief witness to the birth of the modern commercial art market. By examining the critical remarks and characters in Smollett's journalism and histories, the novels Peregrine Pickle and Humphry Clinker, and Travels Through France and Italy, the novelist is portrayed as fully involved with the commercial art market even while he offered perceptive criticism of it. Smollett's complete reviews of fine art from The Critical Review are published for the first time in an annotated appendix, while his involvement with the lavish illustration of his massive Complete History of England is analyzed in a second appendix. The approach to fine art that emerges from his writing modifies our understanding of the public art market of today, making this study of interest not only to Smollett scholars and students of eighteenth-century fiction but also to those interested in the history of art and aesthetic appreciation. William L. Gibson is an independent scholar.