Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology)

How do dealers price contemporary art in a world where objective criteria seem absent? Talking Prices is the first book to examine this question from a sociological perspective. On the basis of a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including interviews with art dealers in New York and Amsterdam, Olav Velthuis shows how contemporary art galleries juggle the contradictory logics of art and economics. In doing so, they rely on a highly ritualized business repertoire. For instance, a sharp distinction between a gallery's museumlike front space and its businesslike back space safeguards the separation of art from commerce.
 Velthuis shows that prices, far from being abstract numbers, convey rich meanings to trading partners that extend well beyond the works of art. A high price may indicate not only the quality of a work but also the identity of collectors who bought it before the artist's reputation was established. Such meanings are far from unequivocal. For some, a high price may be a symbol of status; for others, it is a symbol of fraud.
 Whereas sociological thought has long viewed prices as reducing qualities to quantities, this pathbreaking and engagingly written book reveals the rich world behind these numerical values. Art dealers distinguish different types of prices and attach moral significance to them. Thus the price mechanism constitutes a symbolic system akin to language.

Arts & Photography

Velthuis, Olav

History & Criticism

Princeton University Press

Video art, the Internet, globalization, nomadism, itinerant curators and biennale artists, Installation and Process art, PowerPoint presentations, multiculturalism, design, magazines, fashion, lounges, the DJ, VJ and house culture, blockbuster exhibitions in art galleries, social works of art and socially engaged artists… The art of the past 15 years has moved into these new territories rapidly--so rapidly that more artwork than theoretical reflection or historical contextualization has been generated. During the 1960s, artists and critics were fiercely engaged in naming each new trend--Op Art, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism. Movements were mapped as they happened. In the 1990s, however, the art itself, and the experience it provided, became enough. Focusing on themes such as The Body, Interactivity, Engagement, Documentary Strategies, Money and Curating, Right About Now provides a map for this work, from the 1990s to the present.

Right About Now: Art and Theory Since the 1990s

FOSTER, HAL

BOURRIAUD, NICOLAS

Bishop, Claire

Allen,Jennifer

Von Bismarck, Beatrice

Cherry, Deborah

Berrebi, Sophie

Bleeker, Maaike

Boomgaard, Jeroen

Havránek, Vit

Spiegler, Marc

Zijlmans, Kitty

Valiz

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