The Art of Representation: How Audience-specific Reputations Affect Success in the Contemporary Art Field

Abstract

AcknowledgmentWe would like to thank Tim Pollock and the three anonymous reviewers for their excellent suggestions and guidance. We would also like to thank Martin Gargiulo, Matteo Prato, Heeyon Kim, Abhijith G. Acharya, Fabrizio Castellucci, Yi Tang, and Francois Collet for their valuable feedback, as well as participants at presentations at the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation and at Singapore Management University. We would also like to express our gratitude for the financial support we have received from the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research 2 THE ART OF REPRESENTATION: HOW AUDIENCE-SPECIFIC REPUTATIONS AFFECT SUCCESS IN THE CONTEMPORARY ART FIELD ABSTRACTWe study the effects of actors' audience-specific reputations on their levels of success with different audiences in the same field. Extending recent work that has emphasized the presence of multiple audiences with different concerns, we demonstrate that considering audience specificity leads to an improved understanding of reputation effects. Using data on emerging artists in the field of contemporary art from 2001 to 2010, we investigate the manner in which artists' audience-specific reputations affect their subsequent success with two distinct audiences: museums and galleries. Our findings suggest that audience-specific reputations have systematically different effects with respect to success with museums and galleries. Our findings also illuminate the extent to which audience-specific reputations are relevant for emerging research on the contingent effects of reputation. In particular, our findings support our predictions that audiences differ from one another in terms of the extent to which other signals (specifically, status and interaction with other audiences) enhance or reduce the value of audience-specific reputations. Our study thus advances theory by providing empirical evidence for the value of incorporating audience-specific reputations into the general study of reputation.3

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