Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Recently, the global market for visual art – formal auctions, informal private acquisitions, gallery exhibitions, international art fairs – has increasingly spotlighted artists of color. Latinx artists, artists from the African diaspora (especially, African American artists), and artists from Asia have gained new visibility and unprecedented valuations within these networks of circulation and exchange. This recent increase in visibility reveals the ways in which the contemporary art world market is encouraging the collection of specific racial memories and aesthetic expressions. Furthermore, the inclusion of those lived – racialized – experiences seems to trouble the colonial, imperial, and capitalist ideological foundations that have buttressed this industry. Within this context, however, it is necessary to examine the conditions of these artists’ visibility and circulation. Are there aesthetic, biographical, or industry-based conditions that work as prerequisites to gaining visibility and circulation for these artists? How do the economics of collecting inform these artists’ experiences in the industry and their valuations? How does their inclusion re-structure, ideologically, and aesthetically, what constitutes the global industry for visual art? I argue that this development must be understood within two contexts of their exchange and display: (1) the prominence of global art world fairs as the primary way in which these works are displayed and made mobile, and (2) practices of art market speculation. These two dimensions reveal the stakes for artists of color, their sustainability, their aesthetics, and their ability to produce aesthetics that shape and dialogue with their own racial memories and racial futures.