Contemporary art is central to European culture and economy. The funding and making of art are important issues. However, across Europe radical institutional, market and industry transformation has occurred. Within the contemporary art world many state-funded art institutions are struggling with budget cuts at the same time as the agency of private art actors and collectors are becoming more prominent and regaining dominance. Existing private collectors are becoming wealthier and a range of new art collectors and investors has emerged. The rapid expansion of the global art market has meant that art has entered a period of radical institutional, market and industry transformation. Private art collectors and artist-entrepreneurs are now competing with public institutions and the locus of power is moving from public to private actors. Equally artists are increasingly recast, and are recasting themselves, as entrepreneurs. This 18 months project put forward and examined the idea that there is an on-going re-privatisation of the art world. The project critically explored the premise that it is increasingly private art collectors and artist-entrepreneurs who constitute the cultural field, and therefore also drive the complex value creation of artwork.
In short, the project examined the idea there is an ongoing re-privatisation of the European art world, in which increasingly it is private art collectors and communities of artist-entrepreneurs that are creating commercial value in the contemporary art market. The project suggests that this means new critical investigations of agency, value creation and creativity of the art world are needed. This is important because contemporary art is an area of activity that is central to both European cultural and economic development. The thriving European art scene is also a key field within the creative and cultural industries identified as central to Europe’s development and integration by both the Creative Europe strategy and the Europe 2020 strategy.
The overall aim of the project has been to contribute to important non-academic and academic debates over the geography and practice of the art world, by exploring how this rebalancing is changing how and where agency and value creation now takes place. Equally the project has been a training and mobility fellowship and has involved the training and development of an experienced researcher through: a) time spent in one of Europe’s most innovative centres for human geography research; and b) having the time to develop a new intra-disciplinary empirical research project.
