Local contexts as activation mechanisms of market development: contemporary art in emerging markets Komarova, N.; Velthuis, O.J.M. General rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: http://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. The paper studies how local contexts contribute to the emergence of markets. In particular, it explains how potential entrepreneurs are motivated to become active in establishing new markets. Empirically, the focus is on contemporary art markets in two emerging countries: India and Russia. The paper draws upon qualitative interviews with 65 contemporary art dealers conducted in New Delhi, Mumbai, Moscow and Saint Petersburg. We show how different socio-cultural contexts function as activation mechanisms: in India, family backgrounds predominantly structure the decision-making processes, among others through the economic, social and cultural capital which these families provide. In Russia, by contrast, such family background is non-existent. Instead, the socio-economic turmoil of 1990s and 2000s as well as the strong involvement of the state function as activation mechanisms. We suggest that these different activation mechanisms contribute to explaining the diverging market performance in both countries.
This article develops an analytical framework to study the role of narratives in markets and argues that there is a relationship between the structure and composition of narratives produced by market actors and market dynamics. With respect to theory, the article bridges the perspectives that study markets as cultures and as fields and draws from the organizational studies approach to the analysis of narratives. Two empirical cases of the crises narratives in the emerging contemporary art markets of Russia and India illustrate the use of the framework. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with artists and art dealers as well as observations in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, New Delhi, and Mumbai conducted between April 2012 and June 2013. The article shows that there is a widely shared crisis narrative with a coherent structure in the Indian art market. In contrast, fragmented and contested stories that lack narrative structure dominate in the Russian art market. The analysis of the first case highlights the narrative structure and shows the productive work it does in the Indian market-it provides a moral justification of existing market norms and produces a perspective for the future. The analysis of the second case focuses on the context of narrative production and connects the conflicting interpretations of the crisis in the Russian art market to contested hierarchies and persistent uncertainty.Keywords Antenarrative . Indian art market . Market narrative . Market as culture . Narrative analysis . Russian art market Market actors tell stories: how they are better than their competitors, how a product is of an outstanding quality, how a company or industry is developing. These stories are aimed at customers, competitors, or even themselves (and researchers) and serve as sense-making tools. Exploring the production and circulation of meanings (Velthuis 2005;Zelizer 2010) or
Although discounts in art markets are commonplace, the phenomenon remains largely unresearched. This paper looks at how art market actors understand the functions of discounts, focusing on 'suppliers' of the market and drawing on qualitative interviews with artists and art dealers from New Delhi and Mumbai, conducted in January-April 2013. The theoretical basis of this paper is a cultural sociological stance on the functioning of markets, showing how a shared system of norms and values affects the operation of a market. Two circuits of commerce are distinguished in the Indian art market: internationally oriented artists and dealers, whose attitude towards discounts is shaped by the desire to defend the aesthetic value of art; and locally oriented artists and dealers, who are positive about giving discounts and embrace them as a legitimate element of their national culture.
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