How art market actors experience market emergence in an unequal field: placing Brazilian contemporary art in the global art market

Abstract

This paper contributes to art marketing and consumption literature by studying how art market participants from Brazil–a market considered “emergent”–position themselves in the global art market. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 60 art market participants and participant observation in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the paper shows how position and validation gains are understood as entailing practices of (ex)change (or troca in Portuguese) at the individual and field level. Beyond the extension of their social networks and circulation in art market circuits outside Brazil, art market participants understood their positioning gains as dependent on changes to (the perceptions of) art market practices and operating context, and the negotiation of alternative valuations of Brazilian contemporary art in the global art market, addressing power inequalities.