The Soft Power of Producers: How Norms of Creativity Structure the Contemporary Art Market

• In Event: 318 - Regular Session. Economic Sociology 2

Abstract

Sociologists have predominately taken a “downstream approach” to studying creative industries, analyzing the selection and circulation of creative products only after they have reached or passed through intermediaries; in contrast, I develop an “upstream approach,” which examines how producers create and circulate their work. Rather than studying gatekeepers as synonymous to intermediaries, the upstream approach reveals how producers wield soft power as primary gatekeepers. Using the case of the contemporary art market, I draw on over 100 interviews professional artists, dealers, curators, and private collectors in New York City contemporary art market, as well as two years of fieldwork involving artists’ interactions in the art market. Artists act as gatekeepers by: (1) selecting which works to produce and exhibit; (2) choosing dealers through which to exhibit and sell their work; and (3) recommending other artists to dealers, curators, and collectors. This soft power derives from the social norms surrounding artists’ role as creatives. Specifically, artists’, dealers’, curators’, and collectors’ perceptions about how creativity “works” constructs a highly individualized artist-dealer relationship in which dealers have limited authority to intervene in artists’ processes of creative production and artists have autonomy and legitimacy on the basis of their perceived creative genius and pure artistic interests.

Author

• Hannah Linda Wohl, Northwestern University