Global art markets

Although cross-border exchanges and movement of art date back many centuries if not millennia, it is only recently that people active within art worlds, as well as outside observers, speak of global art markets. The exact meaning of the term is hard to define; in fact, its usage will differ in the various articles of this Special Issue. But what this term alludes to is that artists around the globe produce a form of art which is conceptually, stylistically or in other respects sufficiently similar for people to rubric it under the same category. That category is called ‘global art’ or ‘contemporary art’. Moreover, these artists are part of ‘worlds’, to put it in Howard Becker’s term (1984), or fields, to follow Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 1993), which are becoming increasingly integrated or com-patible, as well as progressively connected by financial and symbolic transactions (Buchholz, 2016).

The formation of these global art worlds and art markets are part of a multifaceted process that is far from linear. Its timeline as well as its depth can differ even across regions that are in close geographical vicinity. The various papers in this edited volume scrutinize and question these developments. They are a selection of papers presented at the conference The Art Market in a Global Perspective, which took place at the University of Amsterdam (2016) and was the final conference of a cross-comparative research project on the rise of markets for contemporary art in Brazil, Russia, India and China, run by the editors of this Special Issue.