E-Book Overview
How do 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 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. What emerges is the most comprehensive description ever published of a contemporary regional avant-garde center, where noble aesthetic ambitions compete with the exigencies of economic survival. Plattner's skillful use of in-depth interviews enables the market's key participants to speak for themselves, giving voice to the many frustrations and rewards, motivations and constraints that influence their interactions with their work, the market, and each other."Plattner analyzes the social and economic factors that govern art markets outside the long shadow cast by chic New York galleries. An insightful and fascinating work."—Library Journal"Explains much about the conundrums and paradoxes of the art world as a whole."—Eddie Silva, Riverfront Times
E-Book Content
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High Art Down Home An Economic Ethnography of a Local Art Market
Stuart Plattner
The University of Chicago Press Chicago & London
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STUART PLATTNER is director of the Program for Cultural Anthropology, National Science Foundation. He was formerly professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and is a founding member and former president of the Society for Economic Anthropology.
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For Phyllis, jessie and Dan The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 6063 7 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 1996 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1996 Printed in the United States of America 05
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ISBN: 0-226-67082-1 (cloth) 0-226-67084-8 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Plattner, Stuart. High art down home : an economic ethnography of a local art market I Stuart Plattner. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-226-67082-1 (cloth).- ISBN 0-226-67084-8 (paper) l. Art-Economic aspects-Missouri-Saint Louis Region. 2. ArtMissouri-Saint Louis Region-Marketing. 3. Art-Collectors and collecting-Missouri-Saint Louis Region. I. Title. N8600.P59 1996 96-14864 306.4'7-dc20 CIP
@> The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39. 48-1984.
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The love and appreciation [of art] is practiced everywhere, and the world treats it as merchandise and bribes; this is indeed a fault of our age. Cai Tao, Chinese scholar, twelfth century (Alsop 1982, 146) There is a time line one can draw from cave paintings from Lascaux, in southern France and Spain, to what you are seeing in the Whitney Biennial and what people are writing about in Art Forum, Art in America, Art International. ... Now the center, the international center, for this is New York. ... Most of the people in St. Louis are not working, consciously working, within this format. ... Most of the ideas of the people who are working in a city like St. Louis, or anywhere out of the center, are things that they want to be doing. They are not consciously striving to be in the Whitney Biennial next year, or to show at the Carnegie International. They mostly are doing their own thing. St. Louis dealer
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List of Illustrations Preface
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