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There is a growing number of sources on the subjects of biennials and fairs. Reviewing three recently published books about art fairs and biennials presents us an opportunity to discuss fresh research on openly market-driven exhibitions (art fairs) and ostensibly less commercial ventures (biennials and the large-scale exhibitions). Arguing for the independence of biennials from the art market, and benefiting from a multidisciplinary perspective, the three publications add innovative knowledge to an issue that still arouses some criticism. Double Trouble in Exhibiting the Contemporary: Fairs and Biennials edited by Cristina Baldacci, Clarissa Ricci and Angela Vettese; From Roman Feria to Global Art Fair, From Olympia Festival to Neo-liberal Biennial. On the 'Biennialization' of Art Fairs and the 'Fairization' of Biennials, by Paco Barragán; and Biennials. The Exhibitions we Love to Hate by Rafal Niemojewski, will be here analyzed in terms of their structure and their contribution to the subject.

In this paper, I examine some of the various ways, spaces, and situations in which one can currently encounter aesthetic content and have an aesthetic experience. By focusing on examples coming from the world of fine arts, my survey will tackle a double question: I will try to investigate where to search for aesthetics and where aesthetics may have something to (re)search. Considering the novel forms of art presentation that are related to the spread of alternative exhibition spaces, I will examine the emergence of new audiences, the rising power of the art market and art commerce, and their dubious influence on the creation of new standards and canons of art.

Brazil’s art market has experienced a significant growth during the 2000s and the first years of the 2010s. This growth, among other things, has stimulated the creation of four contemporary art fairs in the two richest cities in Brazil-São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Even though they all were inspired by international fair models, and they all have attempted to seize the opportunity the Brazilian art market was projecting, they each use different market and symbolic strategies. Three of the four promoted themselves as privileged places to make art more accessible to a broader audience, not exclusively to buy it, but to see and enjoy it. In this article, my goal is to show the reasons and the context behind this positioning strategy choice, its consequences, and, most importantly, the conflicts and adaptations it produced from the first to the more recent editions of those fairs.

This article intends to carry out an analysis of the 14th edition of SP-Arte, one of the most important contemporary art fairs in the Latin American Souther Hemisphere. This edition of the fair took place in a context of great political and social tension in Brazil, framed by the murder of the councilor of PSOL Mariele Franco, and the arrest of former president Luís Inácio Lula da Silva. After a series of other conflicting events, todays political and social scenario in Brazil is tense and chaotic. However, apparently, its art market follows a different path towards growth, thanks to the prominent internationalization of Brazilian art. This paradox was visible in this edition of the fair, whose international repercussion highlighted the fact of having left out of its walls the current tensions and the artistic reactions to them. In this article, we seek to analyze —through the discourses of / about the fair— the reasons for the disconnection of SP-Arte with the current Brazilian context, and to understand the motivations and consequences of that strategy.

By analysing the careers of internationally recognized artists from Lithuania and the relationship between Lithuanian contemporary artists and art galleries and museums, the author explores the challenges faced by today’s artists and hypothetically underlines the principles that could be useful for them in seeking to enter into the global art scene.

Since the French sociologist Raymonde Moulin developed her pioneering research in the 1960s, the art market has been continuously studied by social scientists. For several years now, art market studies have rapidly proliferated. Collectors and collections, though, have tended to draw more attention than professionals and dealers, which remain less analyzed. In this article, we intend to study the impact of the national factor on the gallery sector by using a ranking of the leading contemporary art galleries in the world that we ourselves developed. Having analyzed the construction of the most significant rankings in the art world that all focus entirely or partly on artists, we decided to create one for contemporary art galleries. The methodology that we used will be presented in the first part of the article. In its second part, we will analyze the territorial/national dimension that can be identified in the most important art fair in the world, Art Basel. We will comment on what is revealed by our ranking in terms of countries of origin associated with their share and diverse positions in the ranking. Finally, we will address the contribution that our ranking brings to the knowledge of so-called globalization.

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 .

The sheer volume of data generated on the Internet has reached unprecedented numerical heights and has enabled new data-driven methodologies to study art and its markets. Yet, this type of data-driven research has also generated several unexpected methodological constraints for art markets researchers, particularly due to informational asymmetry. This observation is related to how various players on the Internet make data available, as well as summarize, transmit, gather, and access those data globally. It is not our ambition to present another historiography of art markets research, past and present. Rather, and in keeping with the theme of this special issue, we would like to focus on a few key constraints related to data-driven, contemporary art markets research, the Internet, and the structural recurrence of imperfect data. This contribution focuses on four areas of Internet research and its methods that are particularly problematic for researchers today, namely (1) auctions and online auctions; (2) dealers and galleries; (3) art indices; and (4) art fairs.