The Australian art field : fairs and markets

Deborah Stevenson

Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

3 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

This chapter examines the art fair as an increasingly important aspect of the art field in Australia. It points to their differential scale, including the key cleavage that has become evident between those art fairs that are ‘curated’ and show high-level content as extensions of the gallery-centred national and transnational art marketplace and those that are relatively unmediated spaces where artists sell their work directly to the public, but which also have the potential to challenge, if only at the margins, the structures of commerce and value that comprise the art field. Indeed, primary and secondary networks and hierarchies of markets are emerging that warrant investigation as part of an examination of the art fair as an element of an art world that is transnational, commercial and implicated in the reconfiguring of regimes of value and taste. And although the nation and the processes and governmentality of ‘nationing’ are clearly enmeshed with art as cultural symbol and object of policy, art fairs are largely outside these interrelationships and influences. The chapter also suggests that not only can different types of art fair be understood in terms of Bourdieu’s analysis of taste hierarchies, but many also operate as symbolic markers of economic and social status and controlled spaces of exchange for the elite.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMaking Culture: Commercialisation, Transnationalism, and the State of 'Nationing' in Contemporary Australia
EditorsDavid Rowe, Graeme Turner, Emma Waterton
Place of PublicationU.K.
PublisherRoutledge
Pages40-50
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781315106205
ISBN (Print)9781138094123
Publication statusPublished - 2018

Keywords

  • art
  • art fairs
  • artists
  • commerce

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