Economics of arts and culture

Art Cologne was the first Contemporary Art Fair (CAF), Art Basel is the leading art fair globally, but todays Global Art Fair (GAF) model was invented by ARCOmadrid in beginning and  mid 90s turning the art fair into an 'experience'  showcasing global art as well as a full range of artistic and extra-artistic activities.

Curated art fair sections, panels and conferences, performances, collector's programs, Vip lounges and acitvities, parallel openings at museums...what today everyone considers normal of an art fair didn´t exist in the contemporary art fair. It is ARCOmadrid and its director Rosina Gómez-Baeza who end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s launches a set of activities that were to crystalize in today's experiential art fair model.

Why did ARCOmadrid and not Art Cologne or Art Basel able to pull off today's GAF model?

This is what is here explained with the corresponding data, names and facts.

The impact of the 2008 crisis on the Spanish economy has been very strong and its consequences are still noticeable ten years later, having significantly modified the economic situation and the very structure that supports it. Its impact on cultural industries is seen in the emergence of innovative management models that make it possible to make profitable not only the work of managers, but especially that of creators (Schiuma and Lerro, 2017; Taylor, 2017). Beyond contextualizing the new frameworks applicable at the business level in the cultural field, there is currently a tendency to generate new management strategies that start from the characteristics of cultural organizations and artists and adapt to their needs, resources and development and sustainability goals. Our research analyzes this evolution in the context of the Spanish art market, describing a taxonomy of innovative and resilient business models among art galleries and among artists, which allows them to adapt to the current situation and make their activity economically sustainable.

Essay dealing with the consequences and implications of the so-called rise of the creative industries for  economy, policy and practice of innovation and society in general. The increasing emphasis on creativity as a prerequisite for both innovation and social change makes the nurturing of creative talent a necessity and should make politicians think twice before they curtail spendings on culture.

This paper will consider the diffusion and the adoption of the E-Commerce in the art world. It aims to understand mechanisms at stake given the innovation’s nature and the social system’s structure. Based on information drawn from first hand survey, interview, and observations, and based on ascertainment made by secondary data, we will look at the cultural, social, and symbolic dynamics in the communication and acceptance of the E-Commerce of art.

This article examines the use of the blockchain to create limited editions of digital art with a particular focus on the business models of two companies: Monegraph and Ascribe. For some, the development of blockchain technologies and smart contracts suggests an opportunity for artists to protect their work from misuse and expropriation. For others, it suggests the possibility of stronger forms of digital rights management, going forward, that may negatively impact digital culture. However, this article argues that the aim of limited editions on the blockchain is not usually to institute stronger restrictions over use or a new form of digital rights management but rather to create new kinds of tradable digital assets. In turn, this trend implies a different operation of intellectual property rights with respect to digital culture, one where alienation rather than exclusion is significant, and a different operation of scarcity with respect to digital cultural goods, where their free circulation is not necessarily antithetical to profit.

The fragmentation of the capacities and resources for the development of management of the fortifications of the Maltese islands for cultural purposes has created an over-reliance on government funding and hindered economic development in the sector. Culture, a long time receiver of precious funds, needs to give its contribution to Europe's fledgling economies by consolidating its position and embracing innovation for greater growth. The development of a cultural network as an effort for sharing valuable capacities and assets in order to improve the sustainability and resilience of cultural organisations, is an exercise in management planning and springs forward from European-wide policies to promote co-operation and knowledge sharing. This dissertation presents a proposal for a Cultural Network for Fortifications, steps taken towards the selection of potential members, the development of a management plan, strategies to pursue and assigning project priorities. The projects proposed for the network are assessed for their feasibility and the benefits they impart to both the visitors and the service providers.

CORRECTION in The Purpled World:
In Figure 18 on page 211, the image shown is the wrong one. The image correctly discussed in the text is actually CMS II.7, No. 17 = Arachne 160376. The correct image is available for download at https://arachne.dainst.org/search?q=160376
SUPPLEMENT TO BOOK AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST FROM AUTHOR (see below)

During the Aegean Bronze Age (ca. 3,000-1,050 BCE), the spread of woolen textiles triggered an increased demand for color. The dyes included those made from the labor-intensive processing of crocus stamens (saffron dye), and even more costly dyes made from certain sea snails (the muricidae / Murex). Minoan and Mycenaean textile producers (the palaces) mainly operated in the Black Sea region, rich in gold. "Purpled world" is Morris Silver's term for this emergent ideology. In Part I of The Purpled World, Silver demonstrates how the palaces embedded commercial motivation into traditional rituals, played out in purpose-built textile exhibition spaces, including labyrinths. In Part II, he mines textual, archaeological, and iconographic evidence to reveal the international textile trade. In Parts III and IV, Homer's Trojan War is seen as a trade war, and Homeric heroes have roles as traders and/or agents for Poseidon. In Part V, Silver considers the before-and-after of this "purpled world": Jason and the Argonauts, and the so-called collapse of the Mycenaean Palaces as a manifestation of vertical disintegration in the Aegean textile industry. The Purpled World integrates all these forms of evidence with interpretative insights from Maslovian psychology, as well as the disciplines of fashion studies, marketing, and economics.
Book available online at: https://chs.harvard.edu/read/the-purpled-world-marketing-haute-couture-in-the-aegean-bronze-age/

A  "Supplement" (September 24) concerned with a number of issues raised in the book is available to scholars who email the author (msilver12@nyc.rr.com) and include a brief reference to their research interest.

L’idée de ce sujet s’est mise à germer dans mon esprit il y a quelques années en lisant un numéro du Journal des Arts. Le journaliste commentait le dernier classement d’artistes Artindex. Son langage était troublant, digne d’un compte rendu d’événement sportif : Célèste Boursier Mougenot vient d’effectuer une remontée spectaculaire en prenant plus de 34 places… De son côté Soulages est en pleine stagnation…  On déplore le recul de l’artiste libanais… Le journaliste n’évoquait jamais le contenu de leur travail. Cela semblait sans importance. Pourtant, le classement était là. Il s’agissait à mes yeux de la liste des meilleurs artistes contemporains du moment. Consciencieux et afin d’être renseigné sur « les artistes de demain », j’ai effectué des recherches sur quelques artistes dont je ne connaissais pas le travail. Inévitablement, n’étant pas d’accord avec la place accordée à certains, j’ai critiqué la méthodologie du classement. De là est partie la réflexion. Au fil du temps, je me suis rendu compte de l’importance et de la complexité qu’avait acquis certains instruments quantitatifs. Je découvrais l’envers d’un décor. Les artistes étaient hiérarchisés entre eux, leurs fluctuations économiques comparées à celles du pétrole. Pourtant, dans cet univers quantitatif qui me semblait radicalement extérieur à l’art, les artistes les mieux placés étaient presque toujours ceux que mon entourage et moi-même jugions comme faisant partie des plus admirables. Les mathématiques étaient-elles donc aptes à objectiver l’échelle des valeurs artistiques ?

L’histoire de l’art ne semblait pas répondre directement à cette question, seule la sociologie semblait aborder le débat de la valeur artistique frontalement. Mais là encore, une frustration jaillissait. Dans l’approche sociologique, l’art y est perçu uniquement comme un fait social. Sa valeur n’y est affaire que de constructions et d’intermédiations. La beauté, la spiritualité, l’intelligence ou la contextualisation de la création artistique était laissée de côté pour ne privilégier que sa réception sociale. J’ai donc souhaité travailler sur un sujet qui distingue ce qui est calculable et objectivable de ce qui ne l’est pas.

By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, critics and arbiters of taste criticized the taste of the previous British generation. Eighteenth-century British preferences in their opinion, had not only directed money away from living artists, but had spend it on Dutch and Flemish low-life pictures, and weak mannerist Italians. This chapter underlines the cultural bias of such judgements, and compiles data to re-assess eighteenth-century visual preferences. The central figure of this alleged mismanagement of cultural consumption was the auctioneer, and his network of art professionals - to what extent did the auctioneer exercice selection in the course of the auction, and can this be deemed a systematic manipulation of an less than transparent market? The first part of the chapter focuses on the development of the auctioneering profession in London, especially on the internal policing that auctioneers effected, especially through the "conditions of sale" proclaimed in their sale catalogues, and the legal disclaimers they represented. The chapter also highlights how the auctioneer did not position himself as a connoisseur, but rather as an honest merchant who often recommended the advice of knowledgeable middlemen before bidding. The chapter as a whole reconstructs the networks of trust and interaction in the secondary art market.

Félix Ziem (1821–1911) was one of the wealthiest artists in nineteenth-century France. Recognized as the “painter of Venice,” he made his reputation in the 1850s by displaying his landscapes at the Paris Salon. In 1910, thanks to a bequest of Alfred Chauchard that included a number of his paintings, he became the first artist whose works entered the Louvre Museum during his lifetime. To what did the artist owe his fame and fortune? The key to understanding his reputation and, especially, his monetary success, is his account book, which he kept meticulously for more than thirty years, from 1850 to 1883. The aim of this article is to open this “black box” in order to understand both his economic success and the social networks at its core.

What can studying the creation of knowledge tell us about how new technical fields emerge and develop? This paper shows how a knowledge community may be necessary to support the legitimacy of new products that undergo performance evaluation before purchase. Using historical and ethnographic data covering half a century, we review the growth of the art investment field through an epistemic cultures lens. Technical knowledge about the financial characteristics of art has been developed alongside practical knowledge about how best to structure investment ventures. Investment venture success has been determined by legitimacy as much as by profitability, given durable expectations about the evaluation and monitoring of investments. The growth of knowledge, practices and tools was thus a necessary condition for the recognition of artwork as an asset class. Crucially, the epistemic cultures approach highlights deepening knowledge, resources and professional expertise, and their development through experimentation, failures and negative knowledge. This shows accounting issues contributing to technical field legitimacy and emergence, such as the role of knowledge production, valuation practices and receptive environments, and the distinction between legitimate investments that can be valued and investment venture profitability.

L’attività di sostegno alle arti che John Maynard Keynes ha svolto e teorizzato nel corso della sua vita dipende in modo pregnante, anche se non esclusivo, dal recepimento della concezione filosofica di Moore, così come dalla condivisione delle idee e dell’esperienza di Bloomsbury. L’originalità del pensiero di Keynes consiste, in particolare, da un lato nell’inquadrare le arti all’interno di quell’enjoyment of life cui potrà finalmente dedicarsi l’uomo liberato dall’ossessione della scarsità e dal “problema economico”; dall’altro per la soluzione offerta ai complessi rapporti tra arte, stato e mercato, preservando il carattere di libertà e le potenzialità di coesione sociale che qualificano le arti, e delineando con sufficiente chiarezza i ruoli dell’autorità pubblica e della libera iniziativa privata nel sostegno a queste ultime. Ne discende, per la società dell’avvenire e per quella del presente, una concezione non esclusivamente materialistica del welfare state. Il movimento verso la risoluzione del problema economico giustifica le attività intraprese dallo stato per realizzare le precondizioni del vero benessere, dunque non solo di quello materiale. Lo stato potrà abbandonare i criteri di spesa utilitaristici e sostenere le most public arts. Inoltre, attraverso il suo esempio e l’aiuto a istituzioni semipubbliche di promozione delle arti, sosterrà lo sforzo dei cittadini nel favorire forme di enjoyment of life altrimenti sacrificate alla considerazione dell’economia come problema permanente dell’umanità. Il “paradiso ritrovato” di Keynes è qui prospettato come possibile alternativa al modello di welfare state materialistico del secondo dopoguerra: giudicato fallimentare dal punto di vista dell’efficienza economica, e tuttavia sconfitto in primo luogo dalla sua incapacità di attrazione culturale, la società del “paradiso perduto” non contemplerà il sostegno alle arti tra le sue responsabilità.

Opinions that assert virtue of art could only be maintained by excluding its indispensable economic aspects, advocate that dirty hands of economics should be off the arts. However, production of art has never been unconnected with economy. Because art produces goods which have prices, change hands in market, witness value changes, by using various inputs. After all, economists had not much willing to examine art just because the direct relation between arts and economics had been under shadow of more direct relations. Around second half of 20. century, the economics of arts emerged as a sub-discipline of economics thanks to trends that apply the methodology of economics to the arts. Since then, the connection between arts and economics have become more conceivable. Studies related to relation between economy and the arts are relatively more while studies shed light on the intersections of the arts and economics are very few. This paper which begins with Et in Arcadia Ego of Nicolas Poussin, aims to throw light on the distinctive connections between the two disciplines. For this purpose; the economic aspects of the arts emphasized, similar properties of existences of the arts and economics had under debate in a definitional framework, the art definition that economics adopt is provided, value and utility issues revised for the two disciplines, effects of demand and supply factors on art production are interpreted by exemplifying art history.

Our study, which can be considered as a work in progress, is based on a qualitative analysis of data obtained from interviews carried out with different types of active Spanish artists, both emerging artists in the first phase of their career as well as consolidated artists. From the data provided by them, we can offer a brief quantitative approach to certain aspects, although our goal is to go further. From this quantitative analysis we continue our qualitative analysis, which allows us to identify the present problems, demands and needs of the artists with respect to the market agents with whom they maintain commercial relations, as well as the nature of the same as compared to the last decades. This leads us to draw some evaluation conclusions about the possible short and medium term evolution from the current situation of this process of change, and to propose a short code of good practices that can lay the foundations of an optimal relationship between artists and the art market in the near future.

Nuestro estudio, que podemos considerar como un work in progress, se basa en un análisis cualitativo de datos obtenidos de entrevistas realizadas a diferentes tipos de artistas españoles en activo, tanto artistas emergentes en la primera fase de su carrera como artistas consolidados. De los datos aportados por ellos, podemos ofrecer una breve aproximación cuantitativa a ciertos aspectos, aunque nuestro objetivo es ir más allá. A partir de este análisis cuantitativo continuamos nuestro análisis cualitativo, que nos permite identificar los actuales problemas, demandas y necesidades de los artistas respecto de los agentes del mercado con quienes mantienen relaciones comerciales, así como la naturaleza de las mismas en comparación con las de décadas pasadas. Ello nos lleva a sacar unas conclusiones evaluativas sobre la posible evolución a corto y medio plazo a partir de la situación actual de este proceso de cambio, y a plantear un breve código de buenas prácticas que puede sentar las bases de una óptima relación entre artistas y mercado del arte en el futuro más cercano.

Abstract: Arts and economics are fields that gradually intersect theoretically. However, economic theories focus on administrative contributions for arts, i.e. artistic management and, more generally, guidance on cultural policy. The arts, meanwhile, face the economic theories from a notion: art market. Beyond these differences, mutual contributions should aim to locate historical, geographical and epistemologically to understand the relationships that intertwine the arts, works of art, artists, financial globalization and aesthetic produced from our Third World.

Resumen: Artes y economía, campos que poco a poco se cruzan teóricamente. Sin embargo, la comprensión que las teorías económicas hacen de las artes prácticamente se ha reducido a contribuciones administrativas del manejo de empresas artísticas y, en forma más general, a dar lineamientos sobre política cultural. Las artes, por su parte, enfrentan las teorías económicas a partir de una noción: mercado del arte. Más allá de estas divergencias, las contribuciones mutuas deben apuntar a ubicarnos histórica, geográfica y epistemológicamente a fin de comprender las relaciones que entretejen las artes, las obras de arte, los artistas, la globalización financiera y las estéticas que se producen desde nuestro Tercer Mundo.

The Biennialization and Fairization Syndrome
(IntervIew wIth Paco Barragán by Michele Robecchi)

“Art history hasn’t shown much interest in the social and economic conditions of art and its relation to the history of the art market.”
                                                                                                Paco Barragán

In his latest book "From Roman Feria to Global Art Fair, From Olympia Festival to Neo-liberal Biennial: On the “Biennialization” of Art Fairs and the “Fairization” of Biennials", curator and writer Paco Barragán challenges the dominant narrative about the genealogy of art fairs and biennials.

Read on and you will discover that Latin America had at some point the highest concentration of biennial exhibitions, what went wrong with ART COLOGNE, and why a truly comprehensive and balanced study on the phenomenon of fairs and biennials has yet to be made.
                                                                                                  By Michele RoBecchi

The French State collection of contemporary art, housed since 1821 in the Luxembourg Museum in Paris, was composed almost exclusively of French art until Assistant-curator Léonce Bénédite (1859-1925) started buying foreign artworks at the 1889 Universal Exhibition. In 1892 Benedite became director of the museum and energetically set on securing acquisition funds to expand this policy (he was to succeed in getting an independant acquisition budget for the museum in 1897) as well as on finding the financial means to build a large museum of international contemporary art. Delayed by the 1910 flood, political crises, personal intrigues, World War I and the ensuing economic difficulties, the project was only to be realized in 1937, with the building of the Museum of Modern Art for the Paris World Fair, twelve years after Bénédite's death. In the meantime however, Bénédite had organized many exhibitions of foreign art, notably a large exhibition of American art in 1919, and opened in 1922 a makeshift branch to house the collection of foreign contemporary art at the Jeu de Paume in the Tuileries Garden.

Course taught by Dr. Luca Zordan at Saint Petersburg State University of Economics.
International Semester, Bachelor of Economics and Management
Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019.

Since the nineteenth-century emergence of a separated knowledge, which still characterizes most of present academic and social institutions, disciplinary boundaries have blurred in an increasingly interconnected society and digital economy.
The course addresses the introduction and impact of interactions of art and economy as strategy to face fast changes and global challenges, exploring a bright spectrum of case-studies drawn from art movements, museums and business companies in the 20th and 21st century.

"Cover Text: Youngsters and increasingly more older people are turning their backs on classical concerts. This is not because they do not like classical music or lack the education that enables them to enjoy the music. They simply cannot cope with the classical concert etiquette anymore and thus they feel ncreasingly uncomfortable. The etiquette here has become too formal and too elitist. They prefer the informal concert situations of pop music where there is more space to move around, people can react to the music, and do not have to be quiet for the entire duration of a concert.
Our society has been undergoing a fundamental process of informalization since the 1950s. Different art worlds respond to this process in different ways. The classical music world’s response has so far been one of resistance and denial. Here the code of conduct has actually become even more formal over the past 50 years. The current subsidy systems in various European countries enables the classical music world to remain largely unaffected by change. If this situation continues unheeded, the classical concert will lose more and more of its market share."

Background: During the 18th century, a distinctive art style emerged, the Rococo, expression of frivolity and connoisseur taste, where little advances were made in the visual realm. The main objective of this paper is to present a theoretical model that relates royal patronage with artist's creativity.
Methods: This paper presents a theoretical model on the interaction between artists and gallerists of the 18th century, and it allows to study the optimal level of creativity applied by artists to their works.
Results: The model predicts a positive relationship between royal patronage and creativity. Conclusions: The death of King Louis XIV and the consequent reduction in royal patronage could explain the decline, documented by art historians, in the level of complexity of art works produced during the Rococo period.

At the very beginning of this scientific work is very important to emphasize that the connection between economic and artistic performance primarily depends on the time in which we live. With respect to the post-modern context of contemporary society many criteria of modernism are not more valid, but now come into play rules are almost universally valid for all areas of social life. Although it is very difficult to define postmodernism, and it is not the subject of this scientific work, it can be clearly recognize its contours and main characteristics of the new era. Perhaps the key word in postmodernism is eclecticism, which includes projected selection of everything that's available to you regardless of the field of life and social and artistic work. In fact this concept is highway in defining and analyzing notions about the possibilities of active interaction of economics and art that is particularly evident in the case of "project Skopje 2014". Also in this project are represented by two forms of postmodern aesthetics: retro and review of grand narratives. Postmodernists and postmodern cultures tend to be particularly fascinated by the styles and fashions of the past; in this case it is a baroque, which will often use completely out of the original context, while Lyotard sees the collapse of narratives that previously justified the status quo as an important aspect of the postmodern condition. Of course, the modernists are questioning traditional concepts such as law, religion, subjectivity and nationality; what seems to distinguish postmodernism is that such questions are no longer specifically associated with the avant-garde intelligence. Narration, in its many forms, is often seen as central to both economy and tourism research and practice 1. Different scholars have tended to approach tourism and economy narratives from distinct 1 R. Bendix, " Capitalizing on memories past, present, and future: observations on the intertwining of tourism and narration " , Anthropological Theory, 2002

The economy of the arts is exceptional, or rather, it is relatively exceptional. One important characteristic that makes the economy of the arts differ from economies in other sectors is, what Throsby (1994) has called, ‘the work-preference of artists’. When creative artists like composers, writers and visual artists, but also many performing artists like dancers and actors receive more income, they do not use it to work fewer hours in the arts in order to have more leisure time, but instead they use it to work more hours1. Evidently the advantages of working more hours in the arts offset the advantages of more leisure time. This relative anomaly has far reaching consequences for the economy of the arts. It implies that the low average incomes in the arts are largely structural and that subsidies intended to raise income tend to be futile and can easily be counter-productive. At the same time it raises questions about the interpretation of low incomes and the professional status of artists: are artists as badly off as they appear to be? Or should a majority of artists be regarded as happy consumers instead of as miserable producers?

Leonid Andreev (1871-1919) was one of Russia’s most famous literary figures at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, within a decade after his death he had largely been forgotten by both the Russian émigrés living abroad and literary scholars within the Soviet Union. Vadim Andreev (1902-1976), nevertheless, actively managed his father’s posthumous literary legacy by deftly dispersing the remaining biographical and literary documents available to him in order to elicit further study of his father’s oeuvre by scholars in the Soviet Union, as well as repositioning his father’s literary legacy via personal memoirs. In other words, Vadim’s marketing strategies re-branded Leonid Andreev’s posthumous legacy in a way that was appealing to Soviet scholars (and the Party) in the 1960s thereby successfully reintroducing his father’s works into the Soviet literary market and scholarly discourse during a period of rehabilitation and return for many Russian artists. Important in this process was the acquiescence of Soviet scholars, critics and institutions (cultural and political), who all played some role in consecrating the new brand image and guaranteeing its symbolic capital.

Yerleşik iktisat yaklaşımının uzun süredir ihmal ettiği kültür, bireysel ekonomik davranışlar ve toplumların iktisadi gelişmesi arasındaki karşılıklı etkileşimi ve iktisadi fikirlerin ülkeler arasında yayılma süreci gibi konular, son yıllarda iktisat literatüründe tekrar önem kazanmaya başlamıştır. Bu çalışmada ilk olarak bu literatüre ve onun iktisadın temel sorunsalı ile ilişkisine değinilecektir: Neden bazı ülkeler iktisadi gelişme sürecinde başaralı olmuşken, diğerleri hala başarısızlık içinde yüzmektedirler? İkinci olarak, uzun süredir Türk iktisadi düşünce tarihi üzerine yayınlar yapan Prof. Ahmed Güner Sayar’ın çalışmalarından hareketle, yukarıdaki konuların Osmanlı-Türk Toplumunun evrim sürecine nasıl yansıdığını ele almaktır. Profesör Sayar’ın çalışmalarındaki bazı tezlerin ve onların kökenlerinin incelenmesi, bize, Türk İktisat ve Kültür Tarihine ilişkin bir Ülgener-Sayar Yaklaşımını ve onun metodolojik temellerini verecektir.

L'amore per il proprio lavoro e l'esternazione della felicità sono due componenti emotive fondamentali che entrano in gioco nelle dinamiche di sfruttamento del settore delle industrie culturali e creative. Questo articolo le analizza entrambe, evidenziandone i risvolti oppressivi in analogia con le teorie del Conscious Capitalism, dell'ecofemminismo, e di alcuni artisti che hanno affrontato la questione con le loro opere e i loro scritti. L'idea di lavorare per una causa in sé più alta di una ricompensa economica e che il lavoro dell'artista sia frutto di una predisposizione biologica alla creazione da un lato hanno elevato l'arte al di sopra di qualsiasi valore materiale, dall'altro hanno privato l'artista e il professionista in generale della possibilità di rivendicare un'equa retribuzione. La particolare fusione tra imprenditorialità e precariato che caratterizza il lavoratore dell'economia neoliberale, e in particolare del mondo dell'arte, ha introdotto pratiche di autopromozione che improntano i rapporti lavorativi ad una cordialità rassicurante, in una continua negoziazione tra la felicità ostentata e la realtà dei fatti.

Leonid Andreev (1871-1919) was one of Russia’s most famous literary figures at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, within a decade after his death he had largely been forgotten by both the Russian émigrés living abroad and literary scholars within the Soviet Union.  Vadim Andreev (1902-1976), nevertheless, actively managed his father’s posthumous literary legacy by deftly dispersing the remaining biographical and literary documents available to him in order to elicit further study of his father’s oeuvre by scholars in the Soviet Union, as well as repositioning his father’s literary legacy via personal memoirs. In other words, Vadim’s marketing strategies re-branded Leonid Andreev’s posthumous legacy in a way that was appealing to Soviet scholars (and the Party) in the 1960s thereby successfully reintroducing his father’s works into the Soviet literary market and scholarly discourse during a period of rehabilitation and return for many Russian artists. Important in this process was the acquiescence of Soviet scholars, critics and institutions (cultural and political), who all played some role in consecrating the new brand image and guaranteeing its symbolic capital.

This is the introduction to a volume on changing conceptions of value in the pre-industrial and industrial period. To date, the issue of value has mostly been addressed by historians investigating material culture and consumer preferences, who tend to lean on sociological concepts like ‘emulation’, ‘conspicuous consumption’ and 'distinction'. These concepts often imply a shift from a situation in which material culture consolidates and reproduces the status quo of a society of orders, to a situation in which material culture, through innovation and fashion, helps dislodge these same orders. In anthropological terms, this is a shift from a patronage and gift economy to commodity exchange. Moreover, historical literature on material culture larges reduces value to a semiotic problem. The cultural turn, and post-structuralism in particular, has induced an approach in which objects are regarded as ‘signs’ and value is generally synonymous with meaning.
Either way, historical approaches risk constructing teleological views.
Our book therefore adopts a pragmatic approach and a focus on historically contingent repertoires and practices of evaluation. With the help of the economics of convention and actor-network theory we shed an entirely new light on the advent of modern market exchange and long term transformations related to the valuation of products and services. The introduction explains the added value of our approach and presents and assesses the results of the separate book chapters.