New art foundations and public museums valuating artists in Paris

Markets are embedded in social relations and depend on institutions that participate in defining what is valuable. This phenomenon is of specific importance for the contemporary art market, where uncertainty about artwork value is high and museums’ decisions to exhibit certain artists and provide them with symbolic recognition have a tremendous impact on economic value. Museums are not a unified entity, but multiple organisations that exhibit different artists for different reasons and have to be analysed as actors in a field of competition between organisations. The purpose of this chapter is to analyse, in the French context, whether new private art foundations converge with older public museums in determining which artists are valuable. In this study, I compared the programming of two major French public museums and two private foundations between 2018 and 2020. I used museums’ and artists’ websites to build a database of 618 artists, and latent class analysis to identify five typical types of artists. I studied museums’ programming through their portfolios to identify the share of each type of artist they exhibit. The main result of the study is that private foundations replicate, at the French level, international hierarchies that promote international stars (mostly from the United States), while public museums offer more diversified programming in terms of nationality and of levels of recognition

Archaeology · Art · Geography · Immigration · Nationality · Political science · Public relations · Visual arts · Art History and Market Analysis · Computer Science · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Law · Museums and Cultural Heritage

• Scraper les réseaux socionumériques en méthodes mixtes

  Brianne Dubois, Marion Michel•Revue Française de Sociologie•2025

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