Art fairs and power: an investigation into the post-war history of art fairs from radical beginnings to consolidations of globalised power

我们生活在一个“艺术博览会时代”。当代艺术博览会已经成为一级市场艺术品在第一个销售点销售和传播的主要平台。虽然商业画廊正处于危机之中，努力保持空置的画廊空间，并处理大量管理费用以及参展和物业租赁成本，但它们需要博览会：今天，从这些活动中获得的收入平均占画廊年营业额的60%-90%。如果画廊可能认为艺术展是一种必要的邪恶，那么它们在艺术买家(以及艺术界生态中的其他代理商)和普通观众中越来越受欢迎。艺术博览会反映了自1967年成立以来艺术市场的变化：20世纪70年代和80年代当代艺术世界及其市场的增长，随后是全球化和策展人转向，以及2010年代跨国公司的主导地位。我提出的研究将是对艺术博览会的第一次深入研究。它旨在定义一种艺术博览会的类型，将其嵌入到其他文化活动的背景中，如双年展、节日和其他博览会，同时从这些活动中划分出来，承认艺术市场处理独特的、高价值的物品或奇点的独特背景。重要的是，它将为艺术博览会如何作为一个嵌入的因素反映更广泛的社会和经济变化提供新的视角。使用多案例研究系统将艺术博览会的关键标志作为一个组织领域进行讯问，分析的框架将通过跨学科的方法，利用布尔迪厄和福柯的体现和分散权力的概念引入的制度领域的理论，以便将透明度带入这个所有经济市场中最“不透明”的机制。

We live in an "art fair age". Contemporary art fairs have become the dominating platform for the sale and dissemination of art objects in the primary market at their first point of sale. While commercial art galleries are in crisis, struggling to keep empty gallery spaces open and dealing with large overheads in conjunction with fair participation and property rental costs, they need fairs: income derived from these counts today for an average of 60-90% of annual gallery turnover. If galleries might perceive art fairs as a necessary evil, they are ever more popular both with art buyers (and other agents in the art world ecology) as well general audiences. Art fairs have reflected changes within the art market since their inception in 1967: the 1970s and 1980s growth of the contemporary art world and its markets, followed by globalisation and the curatorial turn, and the dominance of multinational corporations in the 2010s. My proposed research will be the first in-depth study of the art fair. It aims to define a typology of the art fair, embedding it into the context of other cultural events such as biennales, festivals and other fairs while at the same time delineating them from these, acknowledging the unique context of the art market as dealing with unique, high-value objects or singularities. Importantly, it will offer new perspectives on how art fairs reflect wider societal and economic changes as an embedded agent. Using a multiple case study system to interrogate crucial markers of the art fair as an organisational field, the framework for the analysis will be through an interdisciplinary approach utilising theories of the institutional field as introduced by Bourdieu and Foucault's concept of embodied and dispersed power in order to bring transparency into the mechanisms of this most 'opaque' of all economic markets.