London, February 4 - 05, 2016
Deadline: Jun 21, 2015

The Venice Biennale and the Art Market, the Venice Biennale as an Art Market: Anatomy of a Complex Relationship

Over its history, the strategic positioning of the Venice Biennale has
seemingly oscillated between a pure exhibition platform and a hybrid
exhibition/exchange platform. At its inception in 1895, the venture
strongly pushed forward an aim of aesthetic experimentation
(laboratorio della modernità) whilst emphasising its scorn of
mercantile concerns (prosaicità mercantile). However the 1899 Catalogue
of the Biennale blatantly belied such initial aim when it signalled the
presence of a sales bureau at the heart of the exhibition palace. From
then onwards, the Venice venture openly acknowledged its function as a
market of international contemporary art, so much so that its General
Secretary claimed in 1906 that the market dimension was a core
component of the Biennale. In spite of drastic artistic, structural and
aesthetic evolution, the Biennale seemingly remained a hybrid
exhibition/exchange platform until 1968.
Due to student protests against bourgeois art, values and consumption,
the post-1968 Biennale closed down its sales bureau and initiated a
thorough rethinking of its raison d’être and positioning. Thereafter it
gradually assumed a role as mediator between market and institutional
structures as it focussed on a leading role in disseminating the latest
artistic trends. This latest phase of its historical development seems
to have looped the Biennale back to its initial aim of bringing forward
aesthetic experimentation with no links with the art market. Or has it?
Taking the Venice Biennale as a paradigm, this interdisciplinary
conference invites papers to probe the obvious or subtle links between
contemporary art (both historically and today), its circuits of
distribution and the art market. Contributions may cover (but are not
restricted to) the following areas:
• Symbolic and/ vs. economic capital in the circuit of art
distribution
• Comparison with ventures similar to the Venice Biennale
• Historical and contemporary case studies of contemporary art
consumption at the Biennale
• Strategic positioning in the art world and its evolution
• Networks of power and their influence on strategic positioning

Our keynote speaker is Olav Velthuis, currently Associate Professor in
the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of
Amsterdam, who has written on the ‘contradictory logics of art and
business’ in the contemporary art market in Talking Prices (2005). He
has also edited Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets A Report on
Current Conditions and Future Scenarios (Sternberg Press, 2012)
Abstracts should be approximately 300 words in length for papers of 20
minutes. Potential speakers should also include a brief biography of
150 words in Microsoft WORD. Please send it to Marie Cambefort-Tavinor:
m.cambefort@iesa.edu