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Summary articles Cultural Entrepreneurship and Innovation
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- Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
I read all the articles, then I marked the important points and put these most important points into this document.
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College 1Wijnberg (1997). Art and Appropriability in Renaissance Italy and the Netherlands in
the Seventeenth Century: The Role of the Academy
Introduction
This paper aims to describe and explain the nature of the competitive processes on the art
markets in these two place-period couples. The main purpose of the paper will be to show
how the characteristics of art markets, and the strategies artists choose, are determined by
the available means of appropriability, and that the availability of specific means of
appropriability can be closely linked to the presence or absence of particular institutions,
such as an academy.
This paper will attempt to explain the characteristics of art products from the relations
between supply and demand, using the concept of the selection system, and the institutional
structures that govern these relations.
In just the same way, expert selection is the system dominating visual art in the twentieth
century, defining the boundaries of that domain: visual art is only art if an expert – a museum
curator, an art critic – calls it art. To achieve success and appropriability, a modern visual
artist needs the backing of experts. This state of affairs would have seemed strange to
medieval or early-Renaissance observers. To them, no real distinction existed between art
and craftsmanship.
This paper will attempt to show that this distinction dates from the Italian Renaissance and
that it was caused by a radical change in the selection system dominating visual art and the
means of appropriability available to artists. It will be argued that the institutional innovation
that played a principal role in allowing this change to take place, was the establishment of
the academy of art because the academy became the cornerstone of the appropriability
regime underpinning the new selection system. We will attempt to support this position by
discussing painting in The Netherlands during the period that coincides, roughly, with the
Dutch Golden Age, precisely because the triumphal progress of the academy was
interrupted in The Netherlands in that particular period. The case of The Netherlands will
thus serve as an argument a contrario with respect to the hypothesized relationship between
the academy and the change in the selection system.
Conclusion
In the fifteenth century, Italian painting and painting from The Netherlands had developed
distinctive stylistic traditions. However, the way in which paintings were produced, sold and
appreciated, did not differ much. Both in the cities of Italy and of The Netherlands, painters
were craftsmen who were organized in guilds. Only masters of the local guild could manage
a workshop, teach apprentices, and sell their output. In this way, the guilds provided
appropriability on a market that was, moreover, highly regulated by these same guilds to
guard against overproduction and cut-throat competition. However, even though competition
was regulated, the dominant selection system was clearly market selection. The main
customers were the religious and civic corporations.
In Renaissance Italy, new types of art customers start to appear: the newly powerful and the
newly rich who discover the value of art consumption as a means to legitimize their power
and affluence. Changes at the demand side trigger changes at the supply side where artists
see opportunities to improve their social, and financial, status. The higher the status of art
and art products, the better they are able to satisfy the needs of the new customers. At first,
only a few artists, backed by extremely powerful customers, succeeded in transcending the
status of craftsmen and liberating themselves from guild restrictions. Later artists used the
,prestige of these predecessors to create, in collaboration with princely patrons and
humanistic scholars, a new institutional structure that allowed artists, as a professional
group, to separate themselves from the practitioners of the crafts and the guilds. In fact, they
separated themselves from market selection. This was only made possible, however, by the
presence of adequate alternative means of appropriability. The cornerstone of the new
institutional structure providing this essential element of appropriability was the academy. By
way of the academy, peer selection, and a measure of expert selection, could dominate
painting. The success of the academy and the success of the new selection system were
mutually reinforcing. The higher the prestige of the academy, the more useful the certification
it provided in a market that was distancing itself from market selection.
Everywhere in Europe, the academy was the lever with which artists moved themselves,
often with the support of absolutist rulers, from a system of market selection to the new
system in which the opinions of peers and experts determined the market value of artwork.
The exception to this trend is the case of The Netherlands during the Golden Age. There too,
the level of demand had risen, relative to the previous period, and the civic and religious
corporations had been replaced as major art consumers by private individuals. However, in
The Netherlands, and especially in the Dutch Republic, legitimation of power and wealth was
not such a significant motivation for art consumption as in Renaissance Italy. In the Dutch
Republic Bourdieu’s three categories of capital, financial, social and cultural, were to a great
extent concentrated in the same hands. Relative to the rest of Europe, a much larger part of
the population consumed art.
The Dutch customers generally just wanted a great number of extraordinary paintings. In
contrast to France or Spain, the Dutch Republic had no absolutist ruler who could use an
academic to shatter the guilds and strengthen his power. However, the rapid growth and
internationalization of the market helped to reduce the power of the guilds in The
Netherlands. This meant that competition on the art market became more free and less
regulated. The art industry in The Netherlands remained dominated by market selection.
Artists had to develop new strategies and find adequate means of appropriability. The most
striking example is that of Rembrandt who, although his enterprise ended in failure,
developed the most innovative strategy for the art market of the Dutch Golden Age.
The case of The Netherlands in the seventeenth century is so important because it shows
how the development of artistic activity as something separated from the forces of the
market was, and is, not the only possible road to aesthetic glory. However, the academic
system quickly conquered the rest of Europe. Both art customers and artists began to
consider it the suitable, even natural, environment for artistic achievement. When demand
for art from The Netherlands drastically decreased at the end of the seventeenth century,
and the strategies adapted to market selection became unsuccessful, artists from The
Netherlands saw no other choice than to adjust themselves to the academic system.
The art market underwent further transformations. The academy lost its central position to a
triumvirate of dealers, critics and museum curators. Peer selection lost importance with
respect to the visual arts, and expert selection clearly became the dominant selection
system. Market selection has not returned to (western) visual arts. Texts about the
economics of the art market sometimes give the impression that the peculiarities of this
market are caused by the exceptional nature of the artistic product or of the average art
producer. This paper has argued that the main causes for these peculiarities are to be found
in the historical evolution of the means of appropriability available to artists and of the
selection system dominating art production.
,Especially in recent years, public authorities have been searching for ways to make art
production less dependent on subsidies. Artists are told that they should adapt themselves
better to the market. Art education is encouraged to become more ‘market-oriented.’ The
argument of this paper shows, on the one hand, that there is nothing against or unnatural to
the proposition that art of the highest quality can be produced in a system of market
selection. On the other hand, this paper also attempted to demonstrate that a selection
system can only change radically if alternative means of appropriability, suitable to the new
system, are found or created.
Important points
As stated above, in a situation where mobility is high and legitimacy scarce, but
where Bourdieu’s (1979) three types of capital – financial, social and cultural – are
exchanged with relative ease, conspicuous consumption can become almost a necessity.
And few products are better suited to this type of consumption than (visual) art, because
among its product characteristics it has both content and form, and both can be used to
express that what the conspicuous consumer wants to express. Content could be used to tell
a story the consumer wanted to be told about himself or about something he considered
important (which also told something about the consumer). Form could be used to show that
the consumer was able to pay for large surfaces of expensive colors, such as ultramarine, or
for intricate ornamentation, but soon it also was used to demonstrate the level of
sophistication of the consumer. It is also significant that this kind of conspicuous
consumption easily leads toward a process of demand competition and a strengthening of
trends with respect to consumer preferences.
Three main strategies can be distinguished in the high-quality/up-market segment.
The first is the strategy chosen by Rubens whose workshop produced in an almost
factory-like manner, with a great deal of division of labour and with little attention to the
expression of individuality in the execution, a large number of ‘tasteful’ pictures? Tasteful is
the sense of a court in the Italian Renaissance, with lots of history and allegory that could be
understood by well-educated humanists and explained to well-educated noblemen.
The second is the strategy chosen by Vermeer and other ‘fijnschilders’ (meticulous painters)
such as Van Mieris or Bol. Even though they certainly respected and studied the work of the
Italian masters of the late Renaissance, their work exemplifies craftsmanship in the best
tradition of the guild. The ‘fijnschilders’ created unsurpassable descriptions of valuable and
often rare objects. Their style did not lend itself to mass production, both because of the
technical mastery required and because of the fact that the paintings too had to be rare
objects themselves.
The third, and most innovative commercial strategy, is the one of “the later” Rembrandt.
Rembrandt internalizes, as it were, the academic standards into the product. Rembrandt
sells individual talent. Rembrandt produces for consumers in the market as if they were
courtiers/experts, able to recognize and appreciate the expression of extremely talented
individuality. Rembrandt chooses to show himself in his dirty working clothes, with his tools
in his hands, as a person who is proud and dignified because he is what he is and he sells
what he is, an exceptionally gifted painter.
Dubois (2012). Recognition and renown, the structure of cultural markets: evidence
from French poetry
Abstract
This article explores the organization of cultural markets through the case of French
contemporary poetry, distinguishing the market for recognition and the wider market for
, renown. The market of poetry is made of large-scale and reputed publishers and a wide
range of smaller firms, which serve as testing grounds for new authors and innovation. How
can the movement of an a priori narrow-appeal literary genre from small publishing houses
to large-scale firms be explained? It is argued that if the status of firms is remarkably stable,
artists may move from small publishers to large-scale ones. Statistical evidence is used to
illustrate this passage, shedding a new light on the structure of cultural markets and the role
of reputation in organizing commercial circuits. Future directions for research are offered.
Introduction
Cultural industries are organized according to an oligopoly fringe model in which large
businesses dominate the bulk of the market, leaving the niches they deem insufficiently
profitable to small firms. This structure is reinforced by the fact that in the cultural industries,
publishers or producers choose what is offered on the market. Economists explain this
segmentation as a matter of market size, arguing that the fringes are commercial niches
abandoned by the large enterprises for lack of interest in investing in small markets that
cannot cover their high fixed costs. Alternatively, sociologists insist on genre distinctions and
the division of the literary field into two distinct poles of production. The first is the ‘‘pole of
restricted production’’ that creates highbrow literature and is governed by concerns about
artistic purity. The second is the ‘‘large-scale production pole,’’ focused on mass-market
literature. However, empirical studies have shown that the genres of seemingly smaller
appeal can reach the core of the market by gaining consecration. I argue that poetry does
not move from small-scale to large-scale publishers, though individual poets do: the status of
publishers is remarkably stable over time, whereas poets may gain in reputation and move
from small firms to large and high-status publishers. The central argument here is that the
structure of markets corresponds to that of reputations, which array themselves according to
the two stages of recognition and renown. Evidence shows that selective matching —
association with high-status partners — proves the most efficient mechanism for building
reputation, as long as the artistic conventions put into play are rather widely shared. In
addition, other reputation-building mechanisms such as awards, criticism and media
coverage, and poetry anthologies have an important role to play, and so they too inform this
inquiry.
Reputation as collective category
Reputation can turn into not only symbolic capital but also financial returns.
Recognition and Renown
Recognition occurs in small, specialized circles where the economic power of businesses
counts for little. Renown comes to the artist whose name goes beyond the circles of the
initiated to enter into History, that arbiter who ‘‘[assigns] recognition to posterity’’. Renown is
at the heart of the sociology and the economics of art, since that is where we find the names
and works that will enter the canon. Renown refers to a phenomenon that is familiar to the
worlds of art: over-selection. Reputation concentrates in a small number of names, and the
disparities among them widen as one’s reputation increases.
The processes shaping recognition and renown may involve different actors (firms, critics
and evaluators, peers), logics, and distribution networks. I propose that cultural markets
array themselves according to recognition and renown, which is why artists move from
recognition generated with small firms to the renown that hinges on the involvement of
large-scale firms.
Reputation and status in the poetry market
We thus have distinct actors and economic mechanisms on the two-staged market of
recognition and renown. Because the status of firms within the hierarchy shows remarkable
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