ART MARKETS 2022 : an Integrated Perspective - Summer School, Antwerp Brussels, July 11 to July 15

The art market is essentially a multidisciplinary object of study. While it is now a significant sector of the global economy, it has long played a seminal role in the circulation and reception of art, and provided the context within which artists created their work. Researchers from disciplines as diverse as economics, finance, law, history, art history or sociology have contributed to a better understanding of the complexity and specificity of this market arena. However, despite the advances made in each of these fields, research on the art market still too often suffers from a compartmentalization by discipline. The Art Markets thematic school aims to bring together the international community of researchers working on the art market and to offer participants the opportunity to better understand the scientific approaches of other disciplines. Sharing a common knowledge base and concepts is a necessary condition for developing transdisciplinary collaborations. To this end, this training offers an interdisciplinary theoretical approach and familiarizes the participants with methodological tools in line with the most up-to-date analytical methods. The interaction between historical and contemporary analyses from the point of view of economics, finance, and sociology is particularly innovative. In the era of globalization and digital technology, art markets are undergoing profound changes that are leading to a reconfiguration of the modalities of interaction between actors and intermediaries. Issues related to artistic exchanges, the emergence or decline of markets, financial speculation, the concentration of actors and the role of agents in building the economic and social value of art have accelerated the need to use robust analytical techniques to better understand these issues. It is also worthwhile questioning whether these developments are so new. For instance, the role of various institutions such as auction houses or art fairs benefit from being re-examined in the light of their historical roots in order to understand their function in an increasingly global art market system . At the same time, the analysis of contemporary art markets allows us to shed light with the advantage of hindsight on the practices, mechanisms and strategies put in place since the emergence of markets for visual arts from the 16th century onwards. In addition, quantitative analytical methods, data modelling and visualization have paved the way for important methodological and epistemological explorations.