High Art Down Home: Economic Ethnography of a Local Art Market

There is, perhaps, no market commodity in the world whose value is so elusive as a work of art. The costs of production, materials, and labour have nothing to do with fixing its price. A piece of art's economic worth depends upon an extraordinarily arbitrary and ephemeral array of social and cultural factors. How, then, do the many artists, collectors, dealers, and curators whose lives and livelihoods are so intimately affected by the valuation of art manage to cope with such an intangible market? To attempt to answer this question, Stuart Plattner eschews the spotlights and media-hype of glitzy New York galleries, and focuses instead upon the more localized, and much more typical, world of the St. Louis art scene. The text that emerges is a comprehensive description of a contemporary regional avant-garde centre, where aesthetic ambitions compete with the exigencies of economic survival. The author interviews market participants, giving voice to the many frustrations and rewards, motivations and constraints that influence their interactions with their work, the market and each other.