Jonathan Harris (ed.): Art, Money, Parties: New Institutions in the Political Economy of Contemporary Art (2004)

This collection of essays sets out to identify and examine the kinds of new institutions and social relations that have emerged and begun to shape the global organisation of contemporary visual art over the past twenty-five years. These institutions and relations, contributors argue, are not simply implicated in the exhibition of art – more than that, they have come to play significant roles in commissioning art production as well as mediating its reception in a number of different ways. Given this reorganisation, the set of concepts through which the ‘art world’ can be thought must be radically reviewed. Developments and transformations in, for example, patronage and managerial arrangements – on a global scale – have begun to outrun existing assumptions, categories and accounts. Terms such as ‘institution’, ‘means of production’ and ‘art world’ itself are invoked and critically scrutinised in all of the essays in this book. Some authors address these and other concepts within detailed empirical case studies, others by experimental application of novel theoretical premises.

This collection also includes discussion by those directly involved in the production and selling of contemporary art, reviewing the increasingly internationalised network now ordering contemporary art’s conditions of production, mediation and consumption. This book shows the complex interaction of the socio-political forces that bear on the art world as well as the tensions between those with different interests in art, raising vital questions about the changed relations between art, society and politics.

Publisher Liverpool University Press, 2004
Volume 7 of Tate Liverpool Critical Forum
ISBN 0853237395, 9780853237396
216 pages

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