Strategic Enrollment: How Art Investment Fit into the Traditional Art Market

• In Event: 263 - Regular Session. Cultural Studies 3: Cultural Fields and Markets: Formation and Transformation

Abstract

This paper discusses the growth of securitized art investment ventures with a brief history and theoretical explanation. Art investment seems justified from a portfolio diversification standpoint, but challenges remain from the traditional art world. Based on my ethnographic findings, art funds face a similar challenge to normal art buyers, in that they are enrolled in mutually agreeable trust circuits, a view that builds upon Viviana Zelizer’s circuits of exchange concept. Art price data from art price providers assumes an important boundary object role, helping to span the gap between the traditional art market and investors with different motives.

Author

• Erica H. Coslor, University of Melbourne