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In 1913, a Matisse show at the Art Institute of Chicago instigated a near-riot. Wealthy Americans, the sort of people who could afford to buy art for their homes, had no taste for it. The general American public, in the period when modern art emerged, around the time of the First World War, had no interest in it. The art world is what gets the image from the studio to the dorm room. The artist produces, and the various audiences-from billionaire collectors to casual museumgoers and college students buying van Gogh posters-consume. When the parts are in synch, you have a market. You know it’s art because galleries want to show it, dealers want to sell it, collectors want to buy it, museums want to exhibit it, and critics can explain it. The same thing was true of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings (around 1950) and Andy Warhol’s soup cans (1962).īut you don’t know it’s art by looking at it.
#World of art text only edition 7th series#
Twentieth-century fine art, in Europe and the United States, passed through a series of formally innovative stages, from Cubism and Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, and each time art entered a new stage and acquired a new look the art world had to adjust.Īt the most basic level, the art world exists to answer the question Is it art? When Cubist paintings were first produced, around 1907, they did not look like art to many people, even people who were interested in and appreciated fine-art painting. It’s continually being reconstituted as new artistic styles emerge. It’s on figures most people have never heard of: dealers, gallery owners, collectors, curators, and critics-the components of what sociologists call the art world. His focus isn’t on the big-name modern artists, like Picasso and Matisse, who are offstage for much of the book. These parts are the principals of Eakin’s story. Goods are far easier to access and to acquire.īack when all of life was offline, back when to buy a record you had to go to a record store, back when there were record stores, the infrastructure required for cultural goods to get from creation to consumption had many more moving parts. But the Internet makes your work accessible to anyone who wants to see it or read it or listen to it or buy a copy of it, because barriers to cultural consumption are also much lower. It’s true that when your product goes online it will be competing with a zillion similar products-and products that do have investors and distributors, such as streaming services, are much more likely to attract audiences and become profitable.