Business Commons^™

The Art Of Representation: How Reputation Affects Success With Different Audiences In The Contemporary Art Field, Gokhan Ertug, Tamar Yogev, Yonghoon Lee, Peter Hedstrom

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study the effects of actors' audience-specific reputations on their levels of success with different audiences in the same field. Extending recent work that has emphasized the presence of multiple audiences with different concerns, we demonstrate that considering audience specificity leads to an improved understanding of reputation effects. Using data on emerging artists in the field of contemporary art from 2001 to 2010, we investigate the manner in which artists' audience-specific reputations affect their subsequent success with two distinct audiences: museums and galleries. Our findings suggest that audience-specific reputations have systematically different effects with respect to success with museums and …