Chinese Contemporary Art in the Global Auction Market charts the rapid emergence of a multi-million-dollar global market for Chinese Contemporary art by revealing the strategic activities of art world agents in promoting the work of ‘avant-garde’ Chinese artists to a Western audience.

A trailblazing look at the historical emergence of a global field in contemporary art and the diverse ways artists become valued worldwide Prior to the 1980s, the postwar canon of “international” contemporary art was made up almost exclusively of artists from North America and Western Europe, while cultural agents from other parts of the world often found themselves on the margins. The Global Rules of Art examines how this discriminatory situation has changed in recent decades. Drawing from abundant sources—including objective indicators from more than one hundred countries, multiple institutional histories and discourses, extensive fieldwork, and interviews with artists, critics, curators, gallerists, and auction house agents—Larissa Buchholz examines the emergence of a world-spanning art field whose logics have increasingly become defined in global terms. Deftly blending comprehensive historical analyses with illuminating case studies, The Global Rules of Art breaks new ground in its exploration of valuation and how cultural hierarchies take shape in a global context. The book’s innovative global field approach will appeal to scholars in the sociology of art, cultural and economic sociology, interdisciplinary global studies, and anyone interested in the dynamics of global art and culture.

The new look on the history of art and its blind spots, the far-reaching digitization of structures and content, the changing role of museums and art criticism, new forces from influencers to NFTs: Hardly any market system has evolved as profoundly in the last decade as the distribution of art. With 25 years of experience in the art industry, Dirk Boll acts as a continuous chronicler and seasonal commentator of these pervasive developments. His handbook Art and its Market is a reliable source of in-depth knowledge about the inner workings of global art market systems. How do auctions, the network of galleries, and fairs work? How are prices being made, and how do trends both in the production of art as well as its collection emerge? What is more, this edition provides comprehensive information on the practical issues of art acquisition: What are the customs and pitfalls, the economic interdependencies between the artists, buyers and other market players, and the legal regulations governing the trade with art?

This book brings together from four years of study on Nigerian contemporary art's internationalization. The monograph integrates voices of African (Nigerian) artists and art market players into the growing discourse on the emerging art markets in the global South. It explores the logic of competition and dynamics of power relations in the global markets, focusing on the internationalization of contemporary art forms from peripheral regions. The book confirms that the internationalization of contemporary art form from Nigeria is limited due to systematic marginalization in the artistic field, which in this case based on postcolonialism, and debilitating socio-economic factors such as outmoded art education, unstructured support system and weak mechanism for local validation, and an inefficient political framework for art governance. It will therefore be useful to students and researchers in the sociology of art, art market studies, art history and culture polity.

This book examines the rising global prominence of China’s art market throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To understand the far-reaching impact of Chinese art on global consumption, this book traces the shift from regional markets to global markets. It asks how the Chinese art market re-emerged from its politicized past, innovated within the private economy boom, remained resilient despite the global financial crisis, and flourished on the global stage despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, it argues that cultural entrepreneurship enabled Chinese art professionals to reinvent their space and to participate in the global artworld.

This is the first English-language account of the modern history of China’s art market that explains the radical transformations from the end of the Cultural Revolution, when a market for art and artifacts did not exist, to today. The book is divided into three sections: Part I examines how the art market in China was suspended during the Cultural Revolution, restarted, grew, and expanded into its current scale. Part II analyzes the distinctive value system of the Chinese art market where the state-run art system including academies, artist associations and museums co-exist with an independent market-oriented system; and traverses the most significant policies that drive decision-making and market structure. Part III explores the driving force of art creation by telling the stories of five contemporary artists across three generations. Arts and culture professionals, scholars, and students interested in Chinese art, global art markets, Chinese government policy, and China will find this to be a valuable resource.

This volume analyzes mediated articulations of “cosmopatriotism” in East and South-East Asian popular cultures and arts. Cosmopatriots navigate between a loyalty to the home country and a sense of longing for and belonging to the world. Rather than searching for the truly globalized cosmopolitans, the authors of this collection look for the postcolonial, rooted cosmopolitans who insist on thinking and feeling simultaneously beyond and within the nation. The cultural sites they discuss include Hong Kong, Indonesia, China, Singapore, the United States, South Korea and Australia. They show how media from both sides of the arbitrary divide between high art and popular culture – including film, literature, the fine arts, radio, music, television and mobile phones – function as vehicles for the creation and expression of, or reflection upon, intersections between patriotism and cosmopolitanism.

In Art to Come Terry Smith—who is widely recognized as one of the world's leading historians and theorists of contemporary art—traces the emergence of contemporary art and further develops his concept of contemporaneity. Smith shows that embracing contemporaneity as both a historical concept and a condition of the globalized world allows us to grasp how contemporary art exists in a fluid space of increasing interdependencies, multiple contemporaneous modernities, and persistent inequalities. Throughout these essays, Smith offers systematic proposals for writing contemporary art's histories while assessing how curators, critics, philosophers, artists, and art historians are currently doing so. Among other topics, Smith examines the intersection of architecture with other visual arts, Chinese art since the Cultural Revolution, how philosophers are theorizing concepts associated with the contemporary, Australian Indigenous art, and the current state of art history. Art to Come will be essential reading for artists, art students, curators, gallery workers, historians, critics, and theorists.

In Minor China Hentyle Yapp analyzes contemporary Chinese art as it circulates on the global art market to outline the limitations of Western understandings of non-Western art. Yapp reconsiders the all-too-common narratives about Chinese art that celebrate the heroic artist who embodies political resistance against the authoritarian state. These narratives, as Yapp establishes, prevent Chinese art, aesthetics, and politics from being discussed in the West outside the terms of Western liberalism and notions of the “universal.” Yapp engages with art ranging from photography and performance to curation and installations to foreground what he calls the minor as method—tracking aesthetic and intellectual practices that challenge the predetermined ideas and political concerns that uphold dominant conceptions of history, the state, and the subject. By examining the minor in the work of artists such as Ai Weiwei, Zhang Huan, Cao Fei, Cai Guo-Qiang, Carol Yinghua Lu, and others, Yapp demonstrates that the minor allows for discussing non-Western art more broadly and for reconfiguring dominant political and aesthetic institutions and structures.