**"The Show Must Go On". Ethnography of the Art Market Facing the COVID-19 Pandemic**

#### **Léa Saint-Raymond**

Ecole Normale Supérieure, 75005 Paris, France; lea.saint-raymond@ens.fr

**Abstract:** This paper aims at understanding, from the inside, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying restrictive administrative measures on the art market. It is based on the interviews and ethnographic surveys made by graduate students from the Ecole du Louvre, from September 2020 to May 2021. This methodology makes it possible to demonstrate that, during the crisis, art market professionals were driven by the motto "the show must go on". On the one hand, they wished to keep a straight face and remain silent on their individual difficulties, preferring to talk about their vocation and the positive effects of the crisis. On the other hand, the commercial activity continued despite everything; if the pandemic accelerated the digital turn of the art market, the physical contact with the works and the collectors remained primordial. The art market thus remained physical but accelerated its digital turn. The proportion of each interactional framework—physical and digital—is still uncertain, difficult to measure today and to predict in the long run.

**Keywords:** art market; COVID-19; pandemic; ethnography

**Citation:** Saint-Raymond, Léa. 2021. "The Show Must Go On". Ethnography of the Art Market Facing the COVID-19 Pandemic. *Arts* 10: 53. https://doi.org/10.3390/ arts10030053

Academic Editor: Elena Sidorova

Received: 4 June 2021 Accepted: 29 July 2021 Published: 3 August 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

Analyzing the art market in a comprehensive way is a complex challenge, especially in times of crisis. Although newspapers regularly publish the results of auction sales, showing sensational hammer prices, the art world remains confidential and quite closed to researchers. Indeed, for the 19th and early 20th century art market, account books remain rare<sup>1</sup> , and, when they exist, they can be difficult to access even a century later. As a consequence, the art market studies therefore generally stop at the secondary market, at the level of auction sales<sup>2</sup> or they focus on specific monographs of dealers and galleries.<sup>3</sup>

As Alain Quemin notes<sup>4</sup> , the most recent reports analyzing the art market contradict each other on the figures because it is impossible to accurately estimate the activity of the primary market, that of the galleries: held by the culture of secrecy, they do not communicate the state of their turnover in an exact manner, hence some variations between reports. The difficulties of access to sources and the asymmetry of information therefore make any global research on the art market difficult, not to mention the lack of historical perspective on the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on the art market, both in the short term and, of course, in the long run.

Nevertheless, the researcher can still observe the art market from the inside, and prefer the qualitative to the quantitative. To have access to the art market "from the inside" is not an easy thing. Some works by sociologists, heterodox economists or geographers based their research on interviews with art market actors<sup>5</sup> or with collectors,<sup>6</sup> allowing them to understand the formation of value, the segmentation and functioning of the different art markets and their globalization. However, interviews can prove to be powerless to grasp the internal upheavals in times of crisis because market players cultivate discretion and master their discourse, being true professionals of communication. It is therefore necessary to go beyond interviews alone, to the heart of the art market. Coupled with the interviews, the ethnographic method—through the students' internships—thus allows one to grasp, from the inside, the consequences of a crisis on the art market.

This article therefore seeks to understand, from the inside, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying restrictive administrative measures on the art market. It is based on interviews and ethnographic surveys conducted by students of the "art market" program at the École du Louvre between September 2020 and May 2021. This methodology, described in Section 1, makes it possible to demonstrate that, during the crisis, art market professionals were driven by the motto "the show must go on". On the one hand (Section 2), they wished to keep a straight face and remain silent on their individual difficulties, preferring to talk about their vocation for their profession and the positive effects of the crisis. On the other hand (Section 3), the commercial activity continued despite everything; if the pandemic accelerated the digital turn of the art market, the physical contact with the works and the collectors remained primordial.

#### **1. Students, Pre-Professionals,** . . . **Ethnographers?**

The ethnographic material on which this article is based was collected by students of the École du Louvre, who are following the "art market" program.

#### *1.1. A Master Based on Encounters with Professionals*

After a year of "second cycle" at the École du Louvre, centered on museology, students choose one of five routes for their second year, at the end of which they receive their diploma, i.e., the equivalent of a master's degree.<sup>7</sup> They can specialize in "research" routes ("history of art, research applied to collections" or "museology research"), or choose from among the three "vocational" routes, i.e., "mediation", "heritage professions" or "art market". The classes in the "art market" program are small—twenty students per year, with different backgrounds; in addition to students who have completed their first year of graduate studies at the École du Louvre (about two-thirds of the class), there are students who have completed a double degree between the École du Louvre and ESSEC Business School, or a double degree between the École du Louvre and Sciences Po Paris. This year, two students have been selected internationally—from Russia and Switzerland. The class is very feminine; out of 20 students, only two are men. Finally, all the students have in common that they want to work in the art market and have already completed one or more internships with professionals.

The "art market" program, which I have been co-directing since July 2020 with Géraldine Goffaux Callebaut, professor of law, and Sylvain Alliod, editor-in-chief of the Gazette Drouot, is divided into two very distinct semesters. Between September and December, students attend classes and seminars, while actively seeking an internship which they complete in the second semester, lasting between three and six months. At the end of this period, they write an "internship thesis" and obtain their diploma. The "art market" program differs from the other Masters 2 programs in that students have numerous contacts with professionals.

Apart from their internship, the students are encouraged to meet with art market players during the first semester, during seminars, and to exchange with them. Thus, between September and December 2020, the students met, as a whole class, with an auctioneer, three gallery owners with different specialties—contemporary art, ancient art and Oceanian artefacts—dealers active at the "marché aux Puces de Paris Saint-Ouen", an antique dealer, an expert, two decorators, two art advisors, a press agency director, a museum curator, a couple of collectors, an economist and an auction house digital director.<sup>8</sup> These exchanges took place at the École du Louvre or at the venue/residence of art market professionals. During each encounter, a student was chosen at random and asked to conduct an interview—without taking any notes or recording the conversation—and then to give a written account of the meeting.

In addition to these reports, this article is based on an optional exercise that I asked the students in April 2021, when most of them were starting their third month of internship. They were asked to write a "field diary", paying attention to the most trivial consequences of the pandemic on their activity and that of the structure that hosted them. Half of the class volunteered and I was able to collect the field notes of ten students who were

doing an internship in ten different institutions—auction houses, art galleries, art advisors, regulatory council or private art foundation.<sup>9</sup>

#### *1.2. An Ambiguous Material*

Students thus documented the COVID-19 crisis from the inside, through interviews and field diaries. It is legitimate, however, to question the "ethnographic" status of this twofold material. Indeed, when conducting the interviews in the first semester, the students were not asked to position themselves as apprentice ethnographers, but as future art market professionals. The heuristic approach is therefore not the same: in one case, it is a question of understanding a milieu; in the other, it is a question of inserting oneself into it—very often, the students prolonged the meeting by an exchange of emails with the professional, in order to "develop their network". The framework of the meeting was not defined as an ethnographic interview, but rather as a teacher–student exchange, during which the professional explained his or her career and experience to the "junior" students, giving them advice: the students did not venture to tackle too openly a "burning issue" or to dig into an aspect considered confidential, at the risk of being seen as unpleasant and compromising their insertion into the professional environment they were hoping to enter. The interview reports thus constitute ambiguous material: if they are ethnographic—which is by definition the "direct" observation of behavior (Weber 2015)—they are ethnographic only in an accidental or incidental way because the framework of the exchange was of a completely different configuration.

In April 2021, I provided students with a course in reflexive ethnography and asked them to apply this method by stepping back from their daily lives during their internship. The material is then less ambiguous than the interview reports because the students added, to their status as professional apprentices, that of budding ethnographers conducting "participant observation" (Malinowski 1922), attentive to the details of interactions and eager to objectify the world in which they work, as they were privileged observers of the art market, being integrated as "insiders" while also being investigators. Nevertheless, despite this training, the ethnographic motivation of this study remains a secondary aspect—the priority being their successful integration into the professional world of the art market. In this sense, this article does not derive from a sociological and ethnographic investigation similar to those conducted by Samy Cohen (Cohen 1999) and Nicolas Jounin (Jounin 2014) with their classes of students wishing to train in the social sciences.

#### *1.3. Ethnographers at the Heart of the Pandemic*

Students in the École du Louvre's "art market" program were privileged witnesses to the COVID-19 crisis, as they followed their course between September 2020 and June 2021. They, unfortunately, observed and lived the impact of restrictive measures on this sector of activity, the timing of which should be recalled. By the time the Ecole du Louvre master started in September 2020, auction houses and art galleries had been open for a few months—at the end of May 2020 in continental Europe, 15 June 2020 for those in London, 6 July for those in New York. However, on 30 October 2020, faced with a second epidemic wave, the French government decided on a generalized lockdown: in particular, museums, art centers and non-essential businesses had to close—including galleries and antique shops. As a consequence, between September 2020 and 30 October 2020, students in the "art market" program were able to meet with art market professionals at their venue, before entering a second lockdown.

This episode ended on 15 December 2020, but art galleries and auction houses were able to reopen earlier, on 28 November 2020. However, the restrictions were not entirely lifted: a curfew was introduced from 8 p.m., and, in view of the arrival of the variants, France prohibited the entry and exit to or from a country outside the European Union except for compelling reasons—from 29 January 2021. The acceleration of the COVID-19 crisis led to new measures on 22 March 2021: in addition to travel restrictions (to/from a foreign country, and in a 10 km radius around the home), "non-essential" businesses

had to close again, including art galleries, which depend on the Ministry of Culture. On the contrary, the auction houses, attached to the Ministry of Justice, could maintain their activity. It was not until 19 May 2021 that the sanitary closure of non-essential businesses was lifted, imposing a maximum capacity for customers.

Students were thus able to experiment with more or less restrictive measures, in a differentiated manner in the course of their academic year and in the sector of the art market they chose for their internship. The next two sections provide an analysis of their participant observation and the interviews they conducted.

#### **2. The Culture of Secrecy: Never Complain, for the Art's Sake**

The first conclusion that emerges from this two-fold material is the lack of grievances about the COVID-19 crisis and the restrictive measures. No art market professional has openly complained about the economic situation, deploring a drop in activity or a decrease in turnover.

#### *2.1. An Inherently Discreet Profession*

In a more or less explicit way, the interviewed actors all emphasize that discretion is compulsory in their profession. For them, confidentiality is an integral part of the art market, whether it be about the clientele or about the works being transacted. A student writes, in the report of his interview with an antique dealer in the Serpette market, at the marché aux Puces de Paris Saint-Ouen: "I won't give details about the objects here because the antique dealer wanted us to be discreet".

By being specialized on "singular" goods—in the sense of the "singularities" analyzed by the sociologist Lucien Karpik (Karpik 2007) and described as incomparable goods and services, not being able to be put in relation to the others—the professionals of the art market aim at removing this uncertainty on the quality of the works, thanks to various tools of judgment and expertise. In this economy of singularities, reputation and word-of-mouth are thus central, in order to guarantee the confidence of customers and colleagues. The same antique dealer explains that if he receives a potential buyer, his neighbors on the Serpette market are on the lookout: if he makes a sale, it is known immediately. "The flea market is a big family", he says. In the same way, a great Parisian decorator confirms the importance of word-of-mouth, testifying that he has no need to canvass potential customers; they directly come to him. This is also the opinion of a manager of artistic and cultural heritage, whose company communicates mainly by word-of-mouth, and not by an internet site giving examples of past missions. During the student interviews, no art market professional gave the names of their collectors or clients. Even the director of a press agency, specialized in the art market, insists on this culture of secrecy, even though her job is to work on the publicity of her clients: "a great confidentiality and discretion, these are certainly qualities explaining why the persons who entrust me with projects, are numerous".

During their internship, students were also required to maintain confidentiality, which could take many forms, from implicit trust to a written agreement. While interning in Belgium at a private nonprofit foundation founded by a contemporary art collector, one student wrote: "The foundation is developing new projects and I was asked not to talk about them, everything gets known very quickly in the Brussels art market and they knew that I knew people in that environment". Similarly, another student, on an internship at an auction regulation council, said that she had "received instructions of confidentiality and discretion that were always formulated in an implicit way". "For example, during meetings, I was not allowed to take notes, and I had to log in last to be as inconspicuous as possible". Other students, interning with art advisors or in galleries, had to sign confidentiality agreements about the works, subjects, or collectors they were asked to work with.

In the actual division of labor, a structural homology could be observed between hierarchical advancement in the structure and proximity to clients. For example, a student on an internship with an American art advisors group wrote in her field diary, "I had to

sign a confidentiality agreement at the beginning of my internship, but in reality, being a telecommuter, I communicate by email with my managers and no one ever told me for whom I was doing research".

#### *2.2. Crisis or Opportunity?*

Discretion being intrinsically linked to the art market professions, it is not surprising that the crisis was minimized at the time of the interviews. No professional openly lamented a decrease in activity. Only the director of the Professional Committee of Art Galleries (CPGA) spoke of gallery losses, approaching—30% or—40% after the first lockdown, or even—50% at the time of the interview in December 2020, relying on the impact study carried out by the CPGA with 279 galleries10, but never addressing the financial situation of her own gallery. On the contrary, a student, doing her internship in the Parisian modern and contemporary art gallery that had employed her since December 2019, was able to follow the entire COVID-19 crisis and confide, in her field diary, that the activity decreased during the pandemic period, both in the number of exhibitions and in the number of works sold.

During the interviews, professionals were less direct and presented the crisis in a positive light. Thus, the pandemic was less of an obstacle than an opportunity. A Parisian art advisor evokes "a positive phenomenon" as far as she is concerned because she was able to visit more frequently than before the studios of French artists thanks to the time freed by the absence of travel. She adds that defending national artists brings her a lot of pleasure, despite the international vocation of her gallery. The lockdown and restrictions on travel abroad would have freed up time for artists and art objects, both for professionals and, on the demand side, for collectors and clients. An antique dealer from the Serpette market thus reverses any negative preconceptions of the COVID-19 crisis: "the current context is favorable: with the crisis, collectors can turn to less speculative values. Spending more time indoors encourages investment in furniture". The art advisor confirms this aspect: "thanks to this new free time, buyers have taken the time to do research and have become even more interested in artists and works". Thus, according to this rhetoric, the crisis would have allowed a return to "safe havens", to a more sincere and less speculative art.

#### *2.3. From the Economic Register to the Vocational One*

The professionals thus deter from the economics, avoid addressing the financial impact of the health crisis on their activity, and systematically move towards a more vocational register, linked to the "art's sake". It should not be forgotten that the art market professions, based on the expertise of "singular" goods, rely on information: before being specialists in an artistic segment, the market professionals are above all communication professionals. In this sense, they belong to a "difficult environment" for ethnographers (Chamboredon et al. 1994; Cohen 1999; Laurens 2007) because, during the interview, they easily manage to master the interaction and to define the situation. The rhetoric of the passion for art, vocation and the metaphor of the eye thus comes back like a joker to dodge potentially embarrassing questions in an elegant way. For instance, to the question "what has the crisis changed in your profession?" a Parisian antique dealer answered: "the added value of the dealer is to save objects, to be able to guess the masterpiece under the dust or the treasure at the bottom of the box". In an interview, the art advisor reveals the workings of this rhetoric—i.e., not to explain the economic difficulties but to talk about art and artists—as she explains: "no matter how many waves there are in this great tsunami, the show must go on. For that to happen, gallerists need to self-discipline, talk more about art and support artists in their studios".

The same vocational and passionate discourse favors sales. The antique dealer continues: "Passion allows us to make the eye. It is much easier to seduce a buyer when you are yourself under the spell of a work. It's no coincidence that I sell the objects I love much faster than those that leave me indifferent. When the antique dealer has no interest in the object, his argument falls flat. The sincerity of heart in front of the art is the biggest strength

of the dealer". Another antique dealer, well established in Paris, confirms the importance of affect: "It is essential to buy works that we like, they will then automatically fit into a setting composed of works to our taste and it will be easier to talk about them and resell them to collectors".

The control of the interaction between art market professionals and student-ethnographers, or between professionals and their potential clients, is achieved through discourse but also through a whole symbolic arsenal—clothing, body posture, a sumptuous setting for the interaction that produces an "intimidation through space" (Chamboredon et al. 1994; Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot 1991). The restrictive measures linked to COVID-19 have, precisely, redefined the relationship to geography and space, imposing a physical and social distancing and restricting international travel.

#### **3. A New Interactional Framework?**

If there is one visible aspect of the pandemic, and one that art market professionals readily attest to, it is the upheaval in the interactional framework of transactions.

#### *3.1. The Inevitability of a Digital Turn?*

The most obvious impact of the COVID-19 restrictions was the slowing down of a globalized market and the sudden cancellation of fairs and biennials. One student, who signed an internship agreement with an American art advisors group, deplores the fact that her internship was carried out from home: "without COVID, I would have gone to New York where I could have accompanied the managers during visits to collectors. The pandemic has a very heavy impact on my internship, as I am doing research on works that I have never seen or touched . . . ". On the demand side, a student recounts in the field diary her experience in a contemporary art gallery, and notes a decrease in the international clientele, accustomed to the neighboring Parisian palaces: "All the clientele from the Bristol, the Collectionneur, the Reserve etc. (which constitutes the main source of new clientele) obviously could not come". She notes, however, a substitution of physical purchases, in the gallery, by online purchases: "Clients abroad were certainly unable to come, but most of the time they bought the works they wanted for fear that they would be sold to someone else".

As a consequence, art market professionals would have had to turn to digital to make up for the stoppage in international travel and to keep their business going. The galleries that did well, according to one Oceanic art dealer, were those that had an online presence. One antique dealer, active in the Serpette market, confided that during the lockdown, he had failed to embrace the Internet and social networking. "Seeing that many of my antiques neighbors have managed to sell some of their objects, I am now working on developing my digital network to find new buyers", he explained.

If the presence of dealers on online platforms—such as Arnet, Artsy or Proantic—has inevitably increased, the ethnographic survey allows to specify the concrete uses of this digital activity. While doing her internship in a Parisian contemporary art gallery, a student writes in her field diary: "If we were already on Artnet and Artsy before the pandemic (and we did not change our activity on them), it seems to me that we received slightly more inquiries via these platforms. Without being very precise, I would say that we sold between two and four works through this intermediary. Since the pandemic, we systematically do a virtual tour of our exhibitions, putting this link on our website, and sending it to clients in the newsletters announcing the exhibition. We have maintained the same activity on Instagram and the rest of the social networks. Virtual tours are not very effective, do not attract new customers".

Instagram is establishing itself as an essential and effective medium, very often mentioned at the time of the interviews. The head of communications and events at the Biron market explains that "dealers are using social networks more and more, especially Instagram, which allows them to create a virtual showcase at the international level and sometimes to sell". A press agency manager, specialized in the art market, confirms that Instagram is becoming very prescriptive because this social network has become an important medium allowing the dissemination of information to a very broad spectrum of individuals and can therefore enter fully into communication strategies. Two dealers cite this social network as an example. The first, an expert in ancient art, confides that one of the only sales he made during the lockdown was thanks to a photograph of the work posted on Instagram. His son, also a dealer, also offered daily documentation around drawings on Instagram, attracting interest from institutions, collectors and dealers disappointed by the cancellation of the Salon du Dessin—and in the process, new clients. The second dealer, who specializes in Oceanic objects, said he made his first sale through Instagram during the November 2020 lockdown. According to him, a link is created extremely quickly in digital thanks to the informal aspect of the presentations on the internet, notably thanks to the communication by the first names directly, which could counterbalance with the French system too formal even "old-fashioned". It remains to be seen whether this link will last when the collector and the gallery owner meet.

#### *3.2. What Digital Is Doing to Commercial Interactions*

The growing importance of digital technology in the art market—which the pandemic has brutally accelerated—is not without effects on the art market. Indeed, the digital is not neutral but, on the contrary, acts on the transaction and on the information. A Parisian auctioneer explains, for example, that digital technology has allowed his auction house to survive and to attract new customers, but at the same time, it has transformed the way of seeing and promoting objects. In the case of auctions, the main transformation is, according to the general manager of Drouot Digital, "the domination of live on the room", a long-term trend that has been accentuated by the pandemic. Previously, he explains, only a fraction of customers—about 10%—bid from home, mainly by phone or via the deposit of orders. Since COVID-19, online bidding has become the norm, with buyers placing a high level of trust in auctioneers and interacting with them in advance of the sale to ask for details on lots.

The second transformation, again according to the Drouot Digital CEO, is the presence of more distant bidders, induced by online auctions. According to him, a quarter of the registered bidders on Drouot Digital are non-French and half of the global sale proceeds go abroad. Nevertheless, if the internet allows easier access to art sales on the other side of the world and allows dealers to have more visibility, digital technology leads to a third transformation with less positive effects, a dealer of Oceanian objects explains. He illustrates this upheaval with a recent example: "An object estimated between 2000 and 3000 euros was auctioned at 900 euros and, being the only bidder, I won the sale at that price. Afterwards, a collector, who had seen the result of the auction on the internet, contacted me to find out the price I was offering in the gallery. I told him 18,000 euros, and the collector cried foul, accusing me of thievery. But I reminded him of the external expenses and marginal costs associated with the purchase of each object, and I insisted that my expertise also has a price".

The same scenario occurred for a Parisian antique dealer, who insists that with the internet, everyone has access to small sales and, therefore, can see how much an object has been purchased: the dealer who travels across the world to see an object will often find himself facing many dealers who will not have moved. According to the dealer of Oceanic objects, the price transparency that the Internet induces is not bad if it is accompanied by a discourse explaining the procedures, the external expenses and the professional status that justify the differences in price between the auction and the resale in the gallery.

When asked by the students about the reduction of information asymmetry, an Artprice economist differentiated between information transparency and market fluidity. According to him, it is true that online sales have allowed for a real acceleration of the art market, a greater fluidity. However, it is not proven that the art market has become more transparent with digital, by giving more information. Some auction houses do not necessarily publish their results—like Sotheby's for its online-only sales until a few months ago, he explained during his interview in December 2020. Moreover, the condition and

location of lots is not always certain. Even if online-only sales display the number of bidders interested in a lot, transparency would therefore be less good than for traditional sales, he concludes.

#### *3.3. When the Physical Resists: The "Brick and Clicks" Model*

If the digital turn has accelerated with the pandemic, the art market is not about to become totally immaterial. All the interviewed professionals stressed the importance of physical and traditional places to frame transactions. Contacts with the works and with collectors are essential, as the pandemic has revealed.

For instance, a totally dematerialized expertise is being debated. Questioned on the development of digital technology, a gallery owner, also an autograph expert, deplores the enthusiasm of the art market for online expertise. For him, the whole role of the expert suffers because an expert can make the owner of a work of art win or lose important sums. It happens more and more frequently that experts decide not to pronounce themselves, for fear of threats or reprisals. Thus, many experts speak out against online expertise, arguing that it is not possible to judge a work without seeing it in real life. This is also the position of a major Parisian expertise firm, which never gives an opinion from a distance. Another dealer and expert in old paintings and drawings is not as categorical and, in front of the students, admits that he sometimes gives his opinion on a photograph, as the visual already gives a certain number of clues about the work. However, he also recognizes that this does not replace a physical expertise, which completes this first analysis. This flexibility allows him to give his opinion on a large number of works and to capture a wider clientele.

With the COVID-19 crisis, the art market would have become half-digital, halfphysical, with the digital part depending on the nature of the work and its capacity to do without human contact. According to the interviewed Artprice economist, not all market segments work equally well online. In particular, sculptures and objects in relief are difficult to apprehend on the basis of photographs, whereas artists such as George Condo or Andy Warhol are more "online friendly". The dealer of Oceanic objects confirms this analysis and takes the example of two recent sales of tribal art, by Christie's and Sotheby's: Christie's had decided to maintain both channels, physical and live, and obtained much better results than Sotheby's, which had only made one live sale. While aware of the importance of digital, an auctioneer, director of a Parisian auction house, attaches great importance to the Hôtel Drouot, "a magical place, unique in the world". His ambition is to develop his website for the Hotel Drouot, which will centralize all the sales, to become "an essential and universal platform as well as physical and virtual".

If the physical places are essential, "magical", it is because they allow us to create customer loyalty by guaranteeing the credibility of the professionals of the art market, thus the confidence. Physical venues are thus part of the communication strategies, despite the fixed costs they entail, and they participate, more than the online platforms, in a symbolic arsenal allowing to establish a certain connivance with a clientele, thus to create loyalty. A dealer at the Serpette market insists on the importance of contact with collectors, whom he generally receives face-to-face. In the same way, the American art advisors company, in which a student is doing a telecommuting internship, still receives clients "face to face" for very important cases, in dedicated offices, and the managers continue to travel to the collectors' homes to study their works. With the lockdown, explains another student, an intern in a Parisian contemporary art gallery, physical interactions have decreased, especially dinners with clients, which the salespeople used to organize for collectors coming from abroad or whom they had not seen for a long time. In addition, she continues, the sales staff used to be able to receive them in a small salon in the gallery, to discuss them over drinks, but this is no longer done. One imagines that these intimate exchanges will have resumed with the lifting of the restrictions.

The symbolic importance of the physical place can be read in the students' accounts of their visit to a couple of decorators, who received them in their private mansion: "The couple receives their clients in their private mansion, which does not face the street but which remains away from prying eyes and in an intimate atmosphere conducive to confidence and discussion, like the candlelit dinners they organized there before the pandemic. A stone staircase led us to the first room of this exceptional place, the guard room. It was here that Mr. \*\*\* was waiting for us, who was generous enough to open his living space to us. We are instantly projected in the past. The couple pays great attention to the subdued lighting: the chandeliers and wall lamps with candles are at eye level. Hearing also plays a role in this muffled atmosphere. The sound of the crackling of the floor is preserved thanks to the shreds placed underneath. These multi-sensory elements contribute, according to Mr. \*\*\*, to the relaxing atmosphere essential to a prestigious home. The two decorators have made their mansion a welcoming and above all lively place: who would have thought that a little black cat could sit on these 17th century armchairs?"

This long diary extract allows us to objectify the effect of a place carefully elaborated by two art market professionals on visitors, and thus to understand the crucial role of an environment crossed by art and prestige on potential clients. The physical place gives a strong identity to professionals, unlike a single online platform. This is also the reason why some professionals say they still send a paper version of their catalog. The contemporary art gallery that can no longer receive its foreign clients in the small salon continues, nevertheless, to contact a large number of clients by telephone, under the guise of asking them to confirm their address in order to send a signed catalog. For example, many sales have been made through this means, writes the student who is doing an internship there. In the same way, a Parisian auctioneer explains that he is pleased to "cultivate the French charm by continuing to publish and send the paper version of the catalogs".

#### **4. Conclusions**

The ethnographic survey thus reveals the importance of the symbolic in making it through the COVID-19 crisis. In interviews, art market professionals kept their heads high by refusing to talk about their concrete economic and financial difficulties, and by bringing the conversation to a more vocational level: according to them, the pandemic would have been positive because it would have freed up time to do research, to take a greater interest in artists and works, and thus in less speculative values. On the symbolic level, too, the digital turn, accelerated by social distancing, has not eliminated the importance of physical places to cultivate the identity of each professional and retain collectors, by establishing a "privileged" link on the occasion of intimate meetings.

The art market thus remained physical but accelerated its digital turn. The proportion of each interactional framework—physical and digital—is still uncertain, difficult to measure today and to predict in the long run. This paper, written at the end of May 2021, cannot therefore conclude on this aspect. In particular, it is impossible to predict at this time whether fairs and biennials—and if so, which ones—will play as important a role in the art market as they have in the last twenty years. After a sudden halt, will they be as important to the art market when the travel restrictions are lifted? If so, which ones and on what criteria? Only the hindsight of history will tell.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Acknowledgments:** The author thanks Claire Barbillon, director of the Ecole du Louvre, her colleagues and co-directors of the "art market" vocational route, Sylvain Alliod and Géraldine Goffaux-Callebaut, and Carole Blumenfeld for her contacts. She is grateful to all the students who participated in the ethnographic research: Léa Boehm, Lucie Bouclet, Flora Burquier-Chamot, Léa Cance-Sanchez, Orane Conan, Maïa Ferrari, Alice Fuligni, Justine Gal, Polina Kozlova, Haude Le Roux, Constance Lucas, Marius Miquel, Clotilde Monroe, Maud Pangaud, Clotilde Peduzzi, Manon Prevost-Van Dooren, Constance Remy, Perceval Rousseau, Tamarine Schreiber and Clémence Vichard.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **Notes**


#### **References**


Jounin, Nicolas. 2014. *Voyage de Classes. Des Etudiants de Seine-Saint-Denis Enquêtent dans les Beaux Quartiers*. Paris: La Découverte. Karpik, Lucien. 2007. *L'économie des Singularités*. Paris: Gallimard.

Laurens, Sylvain. 2007. « Pourquoi » et « Comment » poser les questions qui fâchent ? Réflexions sur les dilemmes récurrents que posent les entretiens avec des « imposants ». *Genèses* 69: 112–27. [CrossRef]


Weber, Florence. 2015. *Brève Histoire de l'Anthropologie*. Paris: Flammarion.

## *Article* **Why COVID-19 Will Not Change the Global Art Market**

**Feliks Tuszko**

Department of Sociology, University of Warsaw, 00-927 Warsaw, Poland; f.tuszko@uw.edu.pl

**Abstract:** This article investigates the valuation of artworks during the COVID-19 pandemic. It examines how art market participants employ fictional expectations of the future to stabilize valuations during uncertain times. A total of 86 forecasts originating from both the center and periphery of the global art market were analyzed. Taking a meta-analytic approach, focus was placed on what each analysis predicts, how it constructs the future it purports to know, and how the expected value of artworks and methods for their purchase are justified. This uncovered the paradoxical reality of art market forecasts—their authors are convinced that the power of crisis could reformulate the art market, but their conclusions do not assume the possibility of real change. Further, the argument is made that speculation about the future is at the core of today's art economy. Therefore, in a crisis, market participants conservatively orient themselves toward artworks that already have established value.

**Keywords:** art market; COVID-19; forecasts; valuation studies; sociology of art; artworks; visual arts

#### **1. Introduction**

Let us review the press and reports titled "The Impact of COVID-19 on the Art Market", "Art will survive the hard times of the plague", "On the future of the art market and art fairs post-coronavirus", and "How are galleries and institutions adapting to the art world's 'new normal'?". Similarly, the main question posed in this Special Issue of the *Arts* journal is "How has COVID-19 affected the global art market?". Searching for signs of the impact of the pandemic on the art market and trying to predict its future have together become a central problem for analysts. Inherent within these and similar countless statements and queries is a firm conviction that the pandemic is a crisis, an extraordinary situation. Depending on the context, this crisis is treated as a moment of truth, a moment of trial, or a moment of revaluation (Koselleck and Richter 2006; Roitman 2014). A closer look into the same analyses and reports unveils a paradoxical reality. In fact, neither assume that tremendous, fundamental change in the art market could or would occur.

I will argue in this article that speculation about the future is at the core of today's art economy. Therefore, in a crisis, market participants conservatively orient themselves toward artworks that already have established value. For this article, I analyzed 86 forecasts originating from both the center and periphery of the global art market. Taking a metaanalytic approach, I concentrated on what each analysis predicts, how it constructs the future it purports to know, and how the expected value of artworks and methods for their purchase are justified. In this context, my title "Why COVID-19 will not change the global art market" is meant to be provocative. This article will not aim toward further speculation about the future but will rather focus on the present. "Time, as often assumed, does not exist" states Elena Esposito (2011, p. 20), who then adds "The past and the future are never given in the concreteness of actuality. What is, is always present". The future is always uncertain, fundamentally unknown, but nonetheless it is by forming expectations, hopes, aspirations, or speculations about the future that economic actors conduct their actions in the present (Beckert 2016; Boltanski 2011b; Esposito 2011). This article's conceptual premise is based on a stream of research in social science which attends to the perceptions of the future as significant, while being often overlooked, explanations of social outcomes (Beckert and Suckert 2021).

**Citation:** Tuszko, Feliks. 2021. Why COVID-19 Will Not Change the Global Art Market. *Arts* 10: 50. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts10030050

Academic Editor: Elena Sidorova

Received: 28 May 2021 Accepted: 29 June 2021 Published: 27 July 2021

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

Notions of time and temporality have become pivotal for today's attempts to understand contemporary capitalism (Beckert 2016; Harvey 2005; Rona-Tas and Hiss 2011). A key question asked by economists is: How do we forecast the future to reduce risk and ensure profit? More disinterestedly, a similar question is posed by sociologists: How do people act in conditions of constant uncertainty? Uncertainty inherently accompanies human actions but, as many intellectuals point out, uncertainty has never been higher than it is today, and that is a consequence of how value is currently produced and thus by which profit is gained.

People are trying to deal with an unknown future and thereby reduce uncertainty in various ways. They are trying to gain access to it, but if what exists is present, their reachable future will always be a form of speculation, imagination, or expectation. Such efforts to cope with tomorrow's uncertainty today are conceptualized differently as "fictional expectations" (Beckert 2016; Beckert and Bronk 2018) or "futurework" (Fine 2007; Hoppe 2020). All of these efforts pay attention to how people employ imaginaries, narratives, judgments, and calculations to navigate themselves and make decisions about future actions. Predictions themselves are not incidental. First, they are embedded in social norms, institutions, patterns of action, and culture. Second, their creators are reflexive and observe other observers (Stark 2013; Esposito 2013; Esposito and Stark 2019). All of the above indicates that foreseeing the future is never indifferent because it could be performative. The source of efficiency of every prediction counterintuitively relies on its fallibility. This is a consequence of the fact that prediction usually does not take into account its own appearance. To some extent, this is what Merton (1948) called "the self-fulfilling prophecy".

In this article, I treat analyses considering the future of the art market as fictional expectations, the imaginaries and narratives that people employ to act as if they know the future, providing the confidence needed to undertake actions with unknowable outcomes (Beckert 2016). I treat them as cases of futurework, a concept that emphasizes "the occupational mandate of transforming an uncertain future into determinable information" (Hoppe 2020). Some authors of these analyses, such as Art Basel and UBS, possess an authority that makes their forecasts credible and legitimate, likely more so than some other authors (such as lesser-known journalists or lower-profile journals).

To solve the puzzle posed at the beginning—the paradox of predictions that arises from the conviction in the power of crisis to reformulate the art market, and their conclusions that do not assume the possibility of real change—I will introduce in the next part a pragmatic perspective for artwork value creation, or in Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre's words, describe "the passage from the state of trash to that of a sought-after object" (Boltanski and Esquerre 2020, p. 183). I will first point out the structures and devices that people employ when trading artworks despite the uncertainty embedded in them. I will then argue that future orientation is fundamental for artwork valuation and, therefore, in a situation of crisis, forecasts play a crucial role in value setting. Later, I will analyze a collection of forecasts of the art market in terms of how market participants cope with uncertainty. I will point out how people assess potential value in artwork and what the fees for these assessments mean. Finally, I will conclude that the paradoxical nature of predictions arises because they are devices involved in artwork value production, and from that comes their conservative bias toward the durability of value and the predictability of the art market.

#### **2. The Passage from the "State of Trash" to That of a Sought-After Object**

How does an object rise to the status of an artwork? How can it possess value and become a tradable commodity? These questions are central for the sociology of art (Becker 2011; Bourdieu 1996; Moulin 1994; White and White 1993). Artworks are constantly oscillating between two extremes—being a worthless object, trash, or artifact on the one hand and a highly valuable artwork on the other. This uncertainty is inscribed into the existence of all works created by artists. Some of them are forgotten or destroyed as time goes by. Others gain value, or they are rediscovered. The future value of artworks,

like every future, is uncertain. The value of artworks is exceptionally uncertain since it is based on the valuation of their future. According to Jens Beckert (2020, p. 298), the art market can be understood as a "market from meaning", that is, such markets where "quality is not an inherent feature of the product or cannot be known in the present because of the uncertainty of future development." Moreover, this uncertainty is enhanced by the uniqueness and incommensurability of works created by artists (Karpik 2010).

If the level of uncertainty were too high, there would be no exchange on the art market. It would not be possible to set the price for artworks, and so artworks would not be commodifiable. However, it is evident to all that the art market exists. The last decade has brought visible growth in the volume of transactions and the total value of the global art market (McAndrew 2020a). There must therefore be ways of reducing the uncertainty that enables acting on the market. I perceive the art market as a space that is foremost defined by the circulation of artworks as commodities. After Boltanski and Esquerre (2020), I take a pragmatic perspective on the economy and state that within capitalism there is a plurality of setting value orders. In other words, the value of commodities can be generated in different ways. Inquiring valuation processes can deliver a better understanding of current capitalism conditions.

There are different explanations of how actors deal with uncertainty. One set of conceptualizations in the social sciences focuses on the structural–institutional aspects of reality, while another concentrates on the resources employed by humans. The first group refers to those people's actions that are not accidental but are structured by institutions. According to Boltanski's sociological program, which he has been developing for the last three decades (Boltanski 2011b; Boltanski and Chiapello 2007; Boltanski and Esquerre 2020; Boltanski and Thévenot 2006), institutions are primarily semantic in nature. Their role is to help people determine the "whatness of what is" (Boltanski 2011b, p. 56). Institutions allow people, out of the infinite chaos of reality, to choose which elements they will look at a second time. Boltanski and Esquerre (2020) group institutions that serve to valuate goods under the concept of "forms of valorization". Forms of valorization are discursive structures that enable people to associate things with an appropriate way of valuing them. With these structures, people are able to engage in commodity exchange—to estimate and evaluate prices. In the case of this study, it means that art market participants share a similar conception of artworks as a commodity and valuate them in relation to it.

The second set of conceptualizations focuses on human creative capabilities and human agency. People make use of various devices that help them to reduce uncertainty and to generate and stabilize value. In this context, scholars underscore in contemporary markets the prominent meaning of narratives (Beckert 2016; Beckert and Aspers 2011; Boltanski and Esquerre 2016, 2017, 2020; Boyer 2018). Arranged within narratives are relations among things, persons, actions, and states of the world. Thus a sense-making "plot" is created, one which allows actors to navigate themselves and justify their decisions (Beckert and Bronk 2018). Narratives combine tenses: past, present, and future refer to each other. Narratives are usually not individual, even if a single entity expresses them. This is a consequence of relying on institutions (Boltanski 2011b) and second-order observation (Beckert and Rössel 2013; Esposito and Stark 2019), which allow synchronization or coordination of the actions of heterogeneous actors (Boyer 2018). Researchers also conceptualize other devices, calculative (Callon and Muniesa 2005) and judgmental (Beckert 2020; Karpik 2010.) Both serve to amplify the commensurability of commodities and to deliver and coordinate people's judgments about quality. Calculative devices deliver numbers that allow comparison through calculation—data can be on a micro-scale (e.g., rankings of artists, list of artworks prices) or a macro-scale (e.g., market indices that compare the art markets to other markets) (Lee 2018). There are also algorithms that use such data to calculate the most suitable decisions. Judgment devices take a variety of forms, and Karpik (2010) distinguishes different types, including network, confluence (spatial and time proximity), and authority (e.g., appraisals, rankings, critiques). Serving as examples of these devices are the concepts of futurework and fictional expectations (mentioned in the

introduction), by which I interpret forecasts of the art market. Art market participants in their activities use different devices, like forecasts, rankings, and prizes, to make decisions to sell or buy a specific artwork more confidently. This consequently stabilizes the value of artworks and thus the trading of art.

The aforementioned structures and devices mark the space in which one should inquire when wishing to examine the valuation process. This article analyzes forecasts of the art market future that consist of specific forms of valorization and devices. I intend to focus only on those that are future-oriented. Regarding different studies, I state that speculation about the future is a fundamental feature of artwork valuation (Boltanski 2011a; Bourdieu 1993; Moulin 2018). I am aware that there are other well-described ways of valuing works of art, but I will not go into them here if they do not exist in connection with the future (Antal et al. 2015; Beckert and Musselin 2013; Hutter and Throsby 2008.)

According to Boltanski and Esquerre (2020), two forms of valorization are characteristic of artworks: they are valued as parts of collections and assets. According to the authors of "Enrichment", the collection form of valorization is dominant for the art market. The collection form includes rare and unique items (Pomian 1990). Their authenticity is essential to their value—closeness to important people, places, and events from the past is appreciated. Goods belonging to this form are taken out of the order of time and are treated as immortal (often they have been created to be so, or they are continuously maintained). Their value depends on their place in the collection or series to which they belong—on how great the lack of a particular totality would be if a specific object were removed. The other form in the art market is the asset form, in which objects like artworks are secondary to money. This is why a significant feature of assets is their liquidity—objects must be easily sellable to be quickly transformable into money. Objects become assets only when they are bought with the intention to maintain or invest capital. They are valuable only if they can bring profit—the value of a specific entity depends mainly on its potential for value growth. This causes a flattening of objects' characteristics because their differences are reduced only to those important for price justification. In this perspective, the various qualities of artwork, such as authorship, content, size, or materials used, are less important to the buyer than its price potential and whether it can be sold.

In the case of artworks as assets, the future orientation is clearly visible. The valuation of an asset is conducted "in terms of the future revenues that it may generate, which presupposes setting the point in time at which these revenues will be received" (Boltanski and Esquerre 2020, p. 247). In the case of artworks as pieces in a collection, the relation with the future not so obvious. The collection form is oriented toward the appreciation of things extracted from the past—establishing a relationship between a commodity and the past allows actors to emphasize its meaning and authenticity. However, within a collection, valued items can be newly created. As the authors of "Enrichment" soberly noticed, "nothing seems more contemporary than contemporary art, not only because it is shaped in the present, but also to the extent that it boasts of being turned toward the future" (Boltanski and Esquerre 2020, p. 213). To sustain their argument, they propose understanding the valuation of contemporary art as a "retroactive movement" situating the valuer "with regard to the work, in the present but from a vantage point to come, as if the work already belonged to the past or, rather, as if it were, in its essence, so to speak, exempt from the corruption of time" (Boltanski and Esquerre 2020, p. 214). At first glance, the distinction is evident—the collection is about the past, the asset is about the future. Paradoxically, as I would like to argue, a closer look reveals that there is more in common between these two forms of valorization. Both are speculations about a future state. A "retroactive movement" is, in fact, another attempt at anticipation. The difference is subtle and concerns the durability of objects—in collection form, objects are treated as if they were immortal; their asset form is more pragmatic and aligns expectations of the object's longevity with the growth potential of its value. This means that the valuation of artworks inside their asset form can take advantage of their durability—there is no contradiction here (Dobeson and Kohl 2020). Additionally, I will argue further that retroactive or speculative

movements in valuation are not restricted to characteristics of contemporary valuation of artworks, but exist in the case of older, more appreciated artworks.

The above description of valuation refers to valuation in general. In the context of this article, what happens to valuation in times of crisis is important. In the sociology of valuation, more attention has been paid to the underlying reasons for the failure of value-stabilizing devices. It was examined after the fact why, despite active involvement in performing the future, some market participants failed to do so (Boyer 2018; Rona-Tas and Hiss 2011). However, it is important to look precisely at what happens to valuation processes during a crisis. According to Boltanski (2011b) theoretical framework, the current pandemic crisis can be understood as a critical moment, a moment in which increasing levels of uncertainty put existing ways of valuing into question. Such moments can be good subjects for study because they make available to observers the non-obvious rules that determine human actions and how the different value justifications people employ compete with each other. It turns out, nevertheless, as I will argue on the basis of the analysis, that art market participants act in moments of crisis to stabilize and strengthen existing ways of valuing rather than to undermine them.

In the following section, I will use the above framework to analyze forecasts of the art market created in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. I will examine forecasts as devices and their contents as discursive examples of forms of valorization. On the basis of evident similarities between forecasts, I will argue that all of them perform the same in a generalized art market, which I interpret as a consequence of the growing homogenization of ways of valuing art. I will then summarize forecasters' predictions to present how speculation about the future of artworks lies at the core of their valuations.

#### **3. The Art Market Future and the Future on the Art Market**

I built this part on a qualitative analysis of 86 forecasts of the art market's future. The main criteria for selecting data for the research were creation time, media coverage, and place of origin. The collected forecasts were published between March 2020 and April 2021. I decided to extend the period of collected materials to the maximum in order to diversify the perspectives as much as possible. As the pandemic continued, market participants began to become used to operating under pandemic conditions, which may have changed the nature of their predictions. In the research sample, 33 forecasts come from the first half of 2020, 39 from the second half of 2020, and 14 from the first half of 2021. Although the data vary by the institution of origin, institution type was not a criterion for selection. The forecasts were created by media and by institutions that specialize in analyzing the art market. I excluded this criterion because the same group of experts—analysts, academics, practitioners—speaks through both. The collected forecasts have miscellaneous forms there are 10 reports, 44 press articles and analyses, and 31 discussions and interviews with experts. In relation to this, the selection criterion was the size of media coverage. Data were selected for those that had the broadest reach and were created by prominent media and art institutions which are reference points for market participants. The last criterion was the place of origin. The forecasts come both from the world's center and periphery—46 of them were created within the largest art markets, the United States of America and the United Kingdom (in total, 64 percent of the global art market value in 2019), and 40 were created within the comparatively underdeveloped Polish art market (less than 1 percent) (McAndrew 2020a). The collected data were in the English and Polish languages. In the following analysis, I shall denote my statements by the number of forecasts relating to them.

Differentiating the place of origin of forecasts is theoretically important. It is impossible to capture the existence of value, which is immaterial and relational. It is impossible to define precisely where the value exists. It somehow exists simultaneously both in a subject and in an object. It somehow exists simultaneously both locally and globally. Pragmatic sociology, aware of this ambiguity, proposes not to look at the value itself but to look at valuation, that is, how value is produced and how it is used to justify prices. From this perspective, reducing valuation to within national borders would be unjustified. Following Prato and Stark (2013, p. 3) work, valuation is located within attention networks—"an evolving network created by multiple agents allocating their attention and expressing their judgments across multiple situations. Valuation [ . . . ] is shaped by an actor's location (or viewpoint) within such an attention network". With this in mind, I have chosen central (US, UK) and peripheral (Poland) locations in the global network.

This study proposes qualitative insight into predicting the value of artworks. In this regard, I analyzed narratives that are contained within art market forecasts, and I followed how experts were attempting to predict the future and what kind of justifications of artworks' values they employed in these narratives. Specifically speaking, I extracted from the texts all of the sentences about the future of the art market and interpreted the similarities and differences between them. The frequency of occurrence of specific statements is important but not fundamental to this study—as will be seen further on, some predictions occurred more than 70 times, but others only nine times. I will later argue that there is strong convergence between the forecasts regardless of where they come from—at a general level, they were created based on the same forms of valorization. In this context, the lower frequency of occurrence of some statements is linked to their higher detailedness. This does mean that such statements could appear in other forecasts and so does not make them inconsistent.

#### *3.1. The Generalized Art Market*

The analyzed material is characterized by significant consistency regardless of the forecasts' place and time of origin. Wherever and whenever forecasts were published, they have much in common. First, they are extremely coherent and undifferentiated in their predictions. As I mentioned before, the basic way actors deal with uncertainty is based on second-order observation. They observe other observers, who in turn build upon their observation of other observers (Esposito 2013; Esposito and Stark 2019). Thus, such analyzed forecasts quote and refer to each other constantly. Among them, there are noticeable opinion makers who are used frequently as the most credible source of expertise—Art Basel and UBS, Artprice reports in general, and ArtInfo in Poland. The second common feature of forecasts is the object of their predictions. They generally write about the various national, regional, and global markets, but they do so to indicate the level of aggregation of the data. Nonetheless, most of them refer to the generalized art market, which has no geographical or national contours (79 forecasts in total: in English 42, in Polish 37). The nature of the generalized art market is, in fact, an abstract construct, which describes the rules of the art market as if they were universally genuine for any art market wherever it is located. This acts as a reference point or imagination of how the art market works, or what should be valuable and why. In consequence, such a concept does not make geographical divisions. The similarity of peripheral and central descriptions of the generalized art market reveals that the dominant forms of valorization, the status of the artworks as commodities and, tangled in them, ways of valuations, have more in common than it may appear. Therefore, I argue that strong similarities between forecasts show that they perform in the same art market.

What lies behind this generalized art market? I understand it foremost as a stream of narratives that, as I mentioned earlier, arrange the relationships between things, persons, actions, and states of the world. They coordinate the strategies of heterogeneous actors because people use them to navigate themselves and justify their decisions (Boyer 2018; Collier and Tuckett 2021). Thereby, these narratives have crucial meaning in commodifying things by specifying how they should be valued. The most important observation is that there is no remarkable division into forms of valorization in the forecasts. What is, however, visible is a form that combines elements of both collection and asset forms (55 forecasts in total: in English 34, in Polish 21). Artworks are presented as commodities bought for collection or investment objectives; thus, buying art is some combination of collecting and investing. As I would like to argue, the distinction between these purposes is not

fundamental for the commodification process and holds mostly symbolic meaning (Velthuis 2007). There are different usages of the notion of "investment", and it is important that they are usually relational. First, it exists neutrally as a synonym of purchase, positively as the opposite of speculation, and negatively as the opposite of collection. These distinctions do not fundamentally refer to the commodity but to the power position of its owners. This is clearly visible in the case of "collector–advisor–dealer" Stefan Simchowitz, whose activity is described in one of the reports as "speculative" because of his engagement in enhancing specific artwork prices, while a few sentences later, the well-known gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin is designated as someone "who seems gifted at anticipating cultural phenomena" (Ehrmann 2020, p. 46). It is thus impossible to convincingly draw a clear demarcation line between speculation and investment. As Esposito (2011, p. 77) points out, "In all cases where an operator hopes to gain, by buying now with the intention of selling later at a higher price, he/she is placing a bet on the expectations of him/herself and others". Such boundary work (Bodnar and Molnar 2010; Lamont 2000) is an outcome of domination struggles, which is important but is not a subject of this study, and I will primarily focus on the anticipatory aspect of their activity.

#### *3.2. The Future That Is to Come*

"Art has always been a safe house in uncertain times" assures Nicholas Maclean (Brady 2020). I will concisely summarize the fictional expectations provided in the analyzed material. In most forecasts, there exists a firm conviction about the uniqueness of the art market, which distinguishes it from others (53 forecasts in total: in English 26, in Polish 27). The art market is governed by different rules that increase its resistance to external factors. According to the forecasts, the art market will grow as it generally has over the last few decades. The prices of artworks will probably not fall—they will instead stably retain their value. Market growth can be perceived by a volume of transactions or transactional prices, but also by the number of market participants, primarily collectors, and their willingness to purchase art. According to the Art Basel and UBS report, "Across all of the HNW collectors surveyed, 59% felt the COVID-19 pandemic had increased their interest in collecting, including 31% saying that it had significantly done so" (McAndrew 2020b, p. 11). This trend is expected to continue, and the number of collectors will gradually increase (43 forecasts in total: in English 22, in Polish 21). The rich are spending more time locked down in their residencies and they are bored with their interior design; also, they are spending less money on some other status luxury services. That is why the rich will probably be more willing to impulsively spend their growing savings on artworks. In addition, wherever the prediction comes from, there is a sense of confidence that a new generation of collectors is coming into play (13 forecasts in total: in English 7, in Polish 6). Wealthy millennials are treated as the future of the art market—they consume much more than their parents, and they have less sentiment and are therefore more likely to use the internet to buy art.

Even if the art market's future seems to be bright, some turbulence may occur. It will take place mainly in the gallery sector, which may experience a decline in current revenues, and in the employment sector, where numerous public and private art institutions have already downsized staff or announced their intentions to do so (19 forecasts in total: in English 12, in Polish 7). The forecast authors share a firm conviction that art market intermediaries will come out on top after the pandemic (32 forecasts in total: in English 19, in Polish 13). The source of their confidence is their belief in the ability of art market participants to adjust themselves to changing conditions. There is an established link between the characteristic tendency of artists towards novelty and innovation and art institutions, which should, in their opinion, share the same tendencies (that, obviously, is a misconception). In the above context, an imperative for adjustment is evident (31 forecasts in total: in English 18, in Polish 13). Participants should adjust themselves to the current situation. To support such a claim, one of the experts even used a Darwinian metaphor, saying that those who win the competition "will not be the strongest, but those with the

highest capacity to adapt" (Łasiczka 2020). There is also hope expressed that the pandemic will be a catalyst for change (28 forecasts in total: in English 16, in Polish 12).

Let us look closer at these expected market transformations. The prevailing opinion in the analyzed corpus is that in upcoming years there will be an observable shift of the art market toward digitalization (55 forecasts in total: in English 34, in Polish 21). More and more participants will be presenting and selling artworks online. More events will take place virtually. There will be a noticeable expansion of various hybrid business models—much has been written about bricks-and-clicks models which integrate physical and digital presentation. Accessibility to wider audiences will also increase—it will be easier for them to view and purchase artwork. One of the most visible imperatives for change is the enhancement of price transparency (21 forecasts in total: in English 12, Polish 9). The forecast authors encourage gallerists to make traded artwork prices public—this is expected primarily in the case of the online model. Other shifts will take place on both the geographical and operational scales. The first concerns the oft-repeated phrase "local is the new global", meaning that galleries should take advantage of the communities in which they are located (18 forecasts in total: in English 14, in Polish 4). Second, the market will consolidate, which means that the position of the stronger participants will be strengthened, and their standards will be imposed (9 forecasts in total: in English 7, in Polish 2). Based on predictions from the forecasts, I shall draw further analysis and emphasize how these possible futures refer to artwork valuations.

#### *3.3. Valuing the Future*

Time and speculation about the future are central to the activity of market participants. In the analyzed material, much is written about the potential of an artwork and how to assess it. An artwork's potential, like every potential, exists in the present but strictly refers to the future. As Kosmala (2020) writes, "It is only possible to play for an upward trend in the short term if the object really has potential". It should be understood that in the present, there exist artworks that are immersed at the same time in the future or, to be more specific, in our imaginations of the future. This potential could be defined as confidence about the high probability of the object's future state. A collector looking for an artwork to purchase will valuate it in terms of whether it is valuable because it may be valuable in the future. There is no difference between what the valuer has in mind—disinterested artwork importance or self-interested artwork preciousness—both valuations support each other. Such a collector could choose those from the universe of artworks for which the future is quite certain, or from that which is uncertain. As the authors of "The Global Art Market and COVID-19 Innovating and Adapting" report remark, "Amid an economic downturn, as in 2009, high-quality works of art have provided tangible safe havens for collectors" (Gyorgy et al. 2020, p. 48). Such a distinction between works bearing lower and higher risk is considerably visible in a large number of forecasts (38 forecasts in total: in English 19, in Polish 19). To the first stream belong highly recognized works, like those of the Old Masters segment or the most valuable works of the modern or contemporary art segment. To the second stream belong the rest of the artworks, those of more ambiguous status, especially contemporary artworks created by newcomers to the art world—in Poland known as the Young Art segment. This brings us to the language of the financial markets, where there are safe treasury bonds or deposits that serve well for placement purposes (to retain value or increase it slightly), and the alternative risky derivatives that serve investment purposes (to obtain the highest possible return). This analogy is present in the analyzed data, like in the following example: "Art is like the stock market, you can buy shares of start-ups and expect to make a lot of money, because 1 in 100 will work out, and you can invest in shares of companies recognized on the market, the so-called black horses" (Forbes Editorial 2021). This logic is the same whether considering the asset or collection forms of valorization, because in both cases the advantage is taken from the uncertainty of the future. In the asset form, an investor takes a higher risk to generate a higher profit. Equivalently, in the collection form, a person who is running a new collection—for instance, first deciding

to buy works of an unknown artist—has an advantage over other collectors who would start collecting once these artworks have already appreciated (Boltanski and Esquerre 2020, pp. 186–88). This synonymity is well grasped in the words of a collector commenting on the behavior of other market participants: "They do not spoil the fun for me at all. On the contrary, they buy Fangor's [the famous Polish painter—F.T.] paintings for a million zlotys, which I bought many years ago for 10,000. I look for artists at auctions who they will be looking for only in 10–15 years. Then they will be classics. This is what it's all about" (Bartman 2020).

This all brings us to the issue of novelty and innovation in the art market. The most uncertain objects are those that are newly created and those that are forgotten. These are works whose status is vague and for which their value has not yet been fully established. A valuer perceives such objects in terms of their potential. From the valuer's perspective, the objects are undervalued and they put them through tests that could uncover the "real value" of the specific object. One of the most fundamental tests on the art market is transactions. This is mostly, as I argue, because of the price, which is the transaction outcome, expressing value in an empirical form. Price becomes one of the most profound factors of artwork value. The development of analytical tools has made many qualities of artworks more accessible and measurable, as is explained in the following quote: "The increasing access to data and analytics may provide sophisticated buyers with more transparency and detail on potential purchases, which in turn may impact the prices that artworks will achieve at auction" (Barclay and Pizzo 2020).

This brings us to the asset form of valorization, where the potential price is the main valuation principle. In this context, one understands price as a crucial quality signal (Beckert and Rössel 2013) which provides important justifications for the valuation of a specific artwork. This is evident in the frequently repeated market rules such as "what was once expensive is now even more expensive" (Wojciechowski 2020) or "higher-priced works tended to perform better than lower-priced works" (Gyorgy et al. 2020, p. 9). In this context, it should come as no surprise that it has become a reality that the art market is defined by prices, especially by the highest ones. To use the words of cultural critic Fran Lebowitz: "That's what we hear about. The prices. I mean, if you go to an auction, out comes the Picasso, dead silence. Once the hammer comes down on the price, applause. We live in a world where they applaud the price but not the Picasso. They applaud the price!" (Scorsese 2021). Such appreciation of high prices can be interpreted in terms of moral outrage, but there is another explanation. It could be treated as a strengthening of the analogy between artistic and monetary values (Moulin 2018; Zarobell 2020), and, with regard to this appreciation of price, should be interpreted as appreciation of passing a significant test—the market test.

It is not the case that all prices are equally reliable. First, the most credible are those that are outcomes of transactions. Second, market participants assess the context in which prices appear, which could give additional confidence about the credibility of a price. On the art market, auction houses and galleries are the important pricing places. The former are especially crucial because of their public character (which of course does not restrict confidentiality) and appreciation of the prices. Such institutions are at the center of attention networks and they influence how participants valuate artworks. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic led to public art events being canceled and galleries and museums being locked down. The authors of forecasts have expressed concerns about the suspension of the art market, especially the part responsible for sending quality signals (18 forecasts in total: in English 11, in Polish 7). One collector said: "There is nothing publicly to test the market—no fairs or auctions. It's holding up business. People don't really know at what price to trade" (Pogrebin et al. 2020). Prices are essential for economic actors to navigate themselves— if the number of published prices drops dramatically, they have to justify their acquisition decisions because uncertainty about the value of the works increases markedly at the same time. Out of this comes their distrust of digital trade. Until now, prices for works sold exclusively online have been comparably lower than in traditional

sales. Therefore, in the analyzed forecasts, there is visible pressure on sellers to convince their clients that this kind of trade is as legitimate as conventional trade (22 forecasts in total: in English 13, in Polish 11). One expert provides reassurance that, "Once you get to a point where people see online sales maximizing or exceeding value, that would be the tipping point; that's when you'll see our business going broadly online" (Pogrebin et al. 2020).

A response to the distrust could be bricks-and-clicks models that do not forsake physical locations but at the same time appreciate digital trade. Artworks should be presented on the internet with a similar degree of precision with which they are presented on site. This means an accurate description of artworks, their physical characteristics, their provenance, their creators' profiles, and everything else pertinent to their prices. Expanding price transparency is one of the most expected trends in the art market. As Barclay and Del Barclay and Pizzo (2020) argue, "The art market may be ushering in a new world of data, transparency, and efficiency, which could make it even more appealing than it was before". Lack of prices is understood as one of the main barriers to entry into the art market. The argument is that price publication allows entrants to overcome the inaccessibility of the elite art world and encourage potential newcomers, again by demonstrating that many artworks are accessible. Transparent prices could help participants gain higher confidence about their actions and valuate and compare artworks more analytically. The visible price transparency imperative comes with another prominent consequence: it strengthens liquidity in the art market. Boltanski and Esquerre (2020) point out five factors that reveal liquidity: transportability, confidentiality, the existence of institutions that can determine the characteristics of things and give price references, the ease of finding a buyer and quick sale, and the number of collectors. It thus becomes clear that the reinforcement of price transparency refers directly to at least three of these factors. The increasing liquidity of artworks brings them closer to being an asset. This phenomenon is evident when we take a look at the current market boom in non-fungible token (NFT) artworks. Cryptoart marketplaces, such as Foundation.app, Niftygateway, and Opensea, are extreme forms of assetization that makes trading art similar to trading on the stock market (Birch and Muniesa 2020; Sidorova 2019). Everyone has access to it, artworks are traded in real time, and all records are transparent. I do not want to say that this is how the art market will look in the future, but rather that changes in the art market infrastructure can enhance a specific form of valorization.

In this analysis, I have presented how market participants are valuing the future as they try to deal with the uncertainty that prevails on the art market. Artworks are compared in terms of their potential. I pointed out that among the many ways to assess potential, valuation through price-related devices is particularly important. In moments of crisis, market participants are directed toward works that already have value—the current price is a crucial argument for the future price. This reinforces conservative attitudes towards action. This observation resonates with the art market transformations described by Raymonde Moulin (2018), who stated that we are witnessing the disappearance of the avant-garde and the emergence of a primacy of novelty. That is to say, the contemporary art world is reevaluating only the artworks themselves, and not the institutions that exhibit and market them. In the context of my study, this would be associated with the development of the art market and a greater emphasis on stability and, thus, to some extent, predictability.

#### **4. Conclusions**

The puzzle stated at the beginning pointed out the paradox of predictions which shared a conviction about the power of crisis to reformulate the art market, but their outcomes did not assume the possibility of real change. These forecasts were concerned about the future of the art market, but at the same time, they were confident that the art market would deal with current turbulences. After analyzing the forecasts, I can offer at least two convincing answers to this puzzle. The first is that the forecasts do not only describe possible scenarios of the future, but they are actively committed to creating the future. They are employed to reduce uncertainty and, thus, to help accurately valuate artworks. The analyzed data are not only a set of narratives or imaginations, but they also have a strong normative character. As I mentioned earlier, there is clearly an imperative of adaptation, according to which market participants should adapt efficiently and quickly to changing conditions. The normative character was also noticeable in the explicit expectation of digitalization and price transparency.

The second answer is that art market participants are orientated toward stability and internal consistency. It comes to form their efforts to reduce the uncertainty surrounding the value of artworks. This uncertainty is mitigated not only by employing the aforementioned devices but, importantly, it is reduced on a much more fundamental level by likening the ways artworks are valued and how their value is justified. According to Boltanski and Esquerre (2017), profiting from such a heterogenous world as art is possible through the integration of the market into one forcefield, within which financial flows create interdependencies and even solidarity among participants. Of course, it does not exclude the possibility of intense competition among them, but it does protect against fundamental changes in forms of valorization. Otherwise, the existing order of value could be reshaped or shattered, which could reduce the certainty of profiting. The reaction of market participants to the growing uncertainty surrounding the pandemic is a movement towards strengthening the dominant forms of valuation. This is why analysts are calling for greater price transparency and digitalization of the market. Additionally, this is why analysts are encouraging a conservative attitude toward action in the market—saying that what has a value has a price. They prompt buyers to buy established and more expensive works, claiming that this is the best investment in uncertain times. Regardless of whether forecasts come from the center or the periphery, they show the existence of the stream of narratives which I called the generalized art market. At the center of this concept is that it describes the art market as if it were universal, with the same principles of valuation—like valuation in terms of potential future increases in value. In the analyzed data, there are no profound differences between the two dominant forms of artwork valorization—asset and collection. They reinforce each other rather than contradict each other. With reference to Nancy Fraser (2017), I would like to argue that the asset form is dominant for our current highly financialized economy. Therefore, different forms of valorization are adjusted to it, and more and more commodities come under this form. This is how I understand the changes that are amplifying the liquidity of artworks.

Following the above conclusions, I state that even in such uncertain times of crisis, such as the current pandemic, some elements remain durable and are more resistant to change. On the fundamental level, there are forms of valorization, the semantic structures responsible for establishing the order of commodities. There are different lower levels of change usually entangled with the dominant form of valorization, like market infrastructure and devices, but they are historically more volatile and fragile under changing external conditions.

**Funding:** This research was funded by the Polish National Science Centre, grant number 2019/35/N/ HS6/01634.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Acknowledgments:** I would like to sincerely thank those who are close to me and my colleagues for their tremendous support, kind words, and accurate comments, especially Zofia Rohozinska, Mikołaj Lewicki, Mateusz Halawa, Marcin Serafin, and Andrew Tuson. Additionally, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided invaluable feedback.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

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