Official art organizations in the emerging art markets of China and Russia

This chapter explores why official art organizations—artists associations and art academies—which regulated artistic production in Soviet Russia and Maoist China, continue to survive despite changing environments and the development of art markets in these countries. This chapter observes path-dependent processes and instances of institutional complementarities that explain the resilience of institutional arrangements. In China, official art organizations are institutionally complementary with the massive state bureaucracy, and confer a high status on their artist-members, creating hierarchies that function as a judgment device in the art market. In Russia, where these organizations do not grant a comparable status, they instead provide everyday support for their commercially disadvantaged artist-members and create an alternative system of economic relations. By drawing attention to local contexts, this chapter advocates a varieties of cultural capitalism approach to the study of art market development.