Contemporary Art Commons^™

The Explosion Development Of Chinese Contemporary Art Market From 2000 To 2015, Yaning Wang

MA Theses

After Chinese Culture Revolution, the brand new chapter was approaching which opened for the modern Chinese art history; Chinese contemporary art has been deepened understanding by the art market. In the context of an emerging market, art is as much a matter of cultural economy as socio-politics. Thus the thesis will focus on the challenges facing the market and how tradition and economics providing the framework for the sustainability of art market. It will present a historical overview of emergence of Chinese contemporary art the period of 2000 to 2015 and expose the unbreakable bind between the development of its …

Story Of Twin Cities, Who Will Be The Next Storm Center Of Art Fairs?, Rui Bian

MA Theses

Since 2000, with the rapid development of China's economy, the evolution of contemporary art fairs in China has been accelerated. This paper takes two representative cities, Beijing and Shanghai, as examples. In the past one decade, Shanghai and Beijing have respectively led the trend of contemporary art market due to various internal and external factors. This paper uses PEST model to analyze, trying to find out who will be the next center of contemporary art in the next ten years.

The first part of this paper mainly starts from the differentiations in policies and regional distributions of Chinese contemporary art …

How Does Contemporary Artists Consolidate Their Success And Achievements Through Social Media Platform Such As Instagram? : Case Study Of Successful Co-Existing Relationship Developed Between Contemporary Artists Ai Weiwei And Kaws With Their Instagram Account, Rouchen Yao

MA Theses

In the following thesis, I would compare and contrast the two art world phenomenon:Ai Weiwei and KAWS, whom have very distinctive artistic focus and style. And how the two artists utilize their social media platform to achieve different purposes and reflect different values. In the past few years, due to internet accessibility to the art world, online and social media platforms have become an intermediary between the art world and the masses, giving everyone access to art. Being household names from the art world, both of the artists generated a large number of fans on their social media platform of …

Market Value Analysis Of Takashi Murakami's Artwork Under Howard Becker's Theory, Liu Yi-Ding

MA Theses

This paper is an analysis about the artist Takashi Murakami. As a representative of the corporate artist, he is favored by the Art business world while being criticized by many people. This paper adopts American sociologist Howard Becker's art world theory as a research tool to observe that the construction of Murakami and his art market is not the growth of genius, but the result of collective cooperation. Based on two decades of data on the art trade, Murakami has made his unique brand of ultra-flat theory and otaku work. These labels, along with internalization and external marketing, eventually gave …

Chuck Close: The Cost Of Behaving Badly, And #Metoo, Rebecca Cohen-Homapour

MA Theses

In July of 2016, artist, Chuck Close was interviewed with a front cover spread in New York Times Magazine to discuss his legendary career. In December of 2017, Close was accused of sexually mistreating women on numerous occasions. This dissertation considers the powerful artist Chuck Close and repercussions following recent accusations against him made by multiple women. It will help us begin to understand how the recent allegations affect art museums and public exhibitions. There is also a discussion analyzing if an artists’ work can be separated from the reputation of its author. A hedonic regression, data analysis and interviews …

Moral Rights: The Economic Ramifications Of Moral Rights Under Vara In The U.S., Akilah Chandler

MA Theses

When balancing the interests of the art market gatekeepers including patrons, dealers, and auction house intermediaries, with the interest of artists, artists have always bared the shorter end of the stick. It has been almost 30 years since the U.S. legal system acknowledged moral rights and a lifetime that artist have had to defend those rights. However, the question remains— how has the art market balanced these conflicting interests and at what expense? This paper will explore the effects moral rights have on an artist’s market and with that, the overall art market. This paper will also cover the ramifications …

The Rococo Revival In Contemporary Porcelain, Ariel Senackerib

MA Theses

The contemporary design market has seen a resurgence of the rococo style. Porcelain has become a popular medium, and artists and designers have been revisiting the possibilities of it by returning to the motifs and symbols of the mid eighteenthcentury. While there is a wealth of existing literature on porcelain manufactories, including Meissen, Sèvres and others, the rococo style is often overlooked in literature for its cultural and theoretical value. The rococo has been given little consideration by art historians, because of its excessive luxury and cultural appropriation. However, many contemporary artists and designers have found new inspiration in the …

Current Issues In The Conservation Of Contemporary Art And Its Non-Traditional Materials, Sandra Hong

MA Theses

The history of art has shown that artists of the present will always find a way to push boundaries and create unprecedented work, whether through the use of foreign materials, new technical processes, or in concept. However exciting this may be, this innovation in the twenty-first century has brought with it an entire world of new challenges for today’s conservators—the specialists tasked with the seemingly impossible duty of preserving art that, by its very nature, refuses to endure. This thesis is an examination of the unique conservation challenges in contemporary art that have been introduced as a result of an …

The Glass Ceiling: Female Artists' Gallery Representation In The New Millennium And A History Of Imbalance, Caroline Currier

MA Theses

The concept of the “glass ceiling” means that an acknowledged barrier to advancement in a profession exists. This paper discusses the state of gender inequality in contemporary New York galleries today, and how they have changed over the past 10 years as well as contextually, throughout history. Often, gender inequality in the art world is made visible by the lacking number of female artist museum shows or through comparing auction prices. Statistics regarding gallery representation is less common, in part due to the fact that artist representation is a fluid process and it is difficult to track these figures over …

How Do You Depict The Life Of A Soul?: Word And Text In And As Image In Soviet Nonconformist Art, Matthew Blong

MA Theses

Visual artworks by Soviet nonconformist artists, especially those associated with the Moscow Conceptualist and Sots-Art movements of the mid-1960s to mid-1980s, prominently feature experimentations with word and text—both in and as image—for a wide variety of reasons that have been studied by scholars of Soviet and Russian art.

In this paper, a formal and conceptual analysis of nearly thirty text-and-image artworks by nonconformist artists of the period traces the motivations and inspirations for this highly creative and generative practice. Beginning with the desire to resume where the historic Russian avant-garde had left off, these artworks challenge notions of language as …