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Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art
Princeton University Press
September 2005
288 pages
ISBN: 0691121664
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
How do dealers price contemporary art in a world where
objective criteria seem absent? Talking Prices is the first
book to examine this question from a sociological
perspective. On the basis of a wide range of qualitative
and quantitative data, including interviews with art
dealers in New York and Amsterdam, Olav Velthuis shows how
contemporary art galleries juggle the contradictory logics
of art and economics. In doing so, they rely on a highly
ritualized business repertoire. For instance, a sharp
distinction between a gallery's museumlike front space and
its businesslike back space safeguards the separation of
art from commerce. Velthuis shows that prices, far from being abstract
numbers, convey rich meanings to trading partners that
extend well beyond the works of art. A high price may
indicate not only the quality of a work but also the
identity of collectors who bought it before the artist's
reputation was established. Such meanings are far from
unequivocal. For some, a high price may be a symbol of
status; for others, it is a symbol of fraud. Whereas sociological thought has long viewed prices as
reducing qualities to quantities, this pathbreaking and
engagingly written book reveals the rich world behind these
numerical values. Art dealers distinguish different types
of prices and attach moral significance to them. Thus the
price mechanism constitutes a symbolic system akin to
language.
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