| Manning Zhang (Brandeis University) interviews Larissa Buchholz (Northwestern University) about her now book The Global Rules of Art, and her visions in the sociology of art. Manning Zhang: First, congratulations on publishing The Global Rules of Art! Please tell us a bit about the origin story of this important book. Larissa Buchholz: Thank you, Manning. As I explain briefly in the book’s preface, I’ve been interested in global cultural issues for a long time. I grew up in East Germany, where traveling was heavily restricted. And after the Berlin Wall fell, my family seized every opportunity we could to travel beyond the former “Iron Curtain.” Before university, I took a gap year and backpacked with my twin sister across Asia, Australia, and Europe; North America and South America would come later. Those early inspiring experiences kindled my initial interest in how cultures relate and how new cultural configurations take shape across borders. But what turned that early curiosity into a full-fledged research project exploring global dynamics in the art market was a striking event that occurred in 2007. That year works by a group of contemporary artists from China suddenly began fetching multi-million-dollar prices at major auction houses. Soon, their sales had ballooned so drastically that these artists—many of them were relatively obscure just months before—had ascended to the global art market’s highest echelons, rivaling the status of established Western superstars like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. A rapid upheaval like this ran counter to previous research—including my own—which had predicted that despite broader globalization trends, artists from the US and Western Europe would still overwhelmingly remain dominant in the art world’s top tiers, while artists from “the rest of the world” would continue being relegated to the margins. This unexpected turn of events intrigued me, so I soon began interviewing art dealers and experts to figure out what had happened. Those interviews helped me begin to understand just how much the art market had become coupled to a financial logic of valuation, which was quite different from the more cultural expert-driven logic that conventionally constructed artistic value. I thus wanted to learn more about the diverse logics and processes that seemed to be impacting valuation at a global scale. Instead of emphasizing the reproduction of Eurocentric hierarchies¾which was the prevailing view in the sparse literature about the globalization of culture back then¾my focus thereby shifted, and I began trying to explain the possibilities for change. In other words, I wanted to uncover the historical transformations and conditions that allow marginal producers from the “Global South” to break through long-standing barriers and gain recognition on a global level. Yet it took some time before I fully committed to this as a book-length project. Some faculty at Columbia initially thought a project on “global art” was too risky; they suggested I’d be better off pursuing research that looked at “conventional” markets. But I’m grateful to Gil Eyal and Diane Vaughan, who encouraged me then to follow my passions, and to Peter Bearman, who was also a great supporter early on. Once I’d made up my mind, what followed were years of demanding global research, which ultimately led to the book. Manning Zhang: You are known for developing a global field approach to art and culture. What are the book’s central contributions to the sociology of culture? How do you perceive culture in general? Larissa Buchholz: I don’t really subscribe to one particular notion of culture. I remember once talking with Orlando Patterson at Harvard, shortly after he had published his seminal “Making Sense of Culture.” We went back and forth for nearly three hours, discussing also that issue, and afterward, my head was spinning! I still hadn’t settled the question for myself! Ultimately, my approach to culture depends on the problem I’m working on. For example, when I was interested in human rights, I published work that engaged with the world culture approach. But I’ve also done work on Harrison White’s phenomenological network theory, which is inflected in interesting ways by Niklas Luhmann’s take on meaning. Similarly, together with Gary A. Fine and Hannah Wohl we collaborated on an article that draws on symbolic interactionism and the strong program in cultural sociology to analyze the COVID pandemic’s impact on the art market. Each of these approaches, of course, involves a different notion of culture. But they all contribute to our understanding of culture in important ways. I like working in a subfield that is open to a plurality of perspectives. But in my book, I definitely foreground the big “C” tradition—that is, Culture as a relatively distinct sphere of artistic/cultural production. And the broader problem I was facing was how can we reasonably think of and approach this type of culture as something global. When I began the project, very little sociological research existed that looked at cultural realms at that scale. We had single case studies on art worlds outside of North America and Western Europe, important comparative work on how globalization affects cultural production in different national settings, and fascinating analyses about patterns of cross-border cultural flows (e.g., book translations or film). But there was still relatively little research that tried to theorize a global cultural system in itself, as a distinct entity that is more than just the sum of art worlds in various countries around the world. So on a most general level, my book tries to contribute toward the development of a global perspective for how we can study art and culture sociologically. My hope is that it also makes clear that such a perspective is useful to keep in mind, even when we’re just looking at single nations or regions, because different scales of cultural production can interact in important and intricate ways. Of course, when you engage with global art, you can’t ignore cultural sociology when trying to capture the complex meanings embedded in transgressive global circulation processes. And I found that working with, and extending, cultural field theory was particularly helpful. It allowed me to theorize both the commonalities and diversity of meanings in the globalizing art space: While global fields cohere (rather than converge) around certain meaningful frames of reference, they are also spaces where cultural differences clash and compete. For example, since the late 1980s, exhibition makers in the biennial circuit have increasingly come to share a meaningful vision of “global” rather than “international” contemporary art. Their interpretations of what “global art” means specifically, and who should qualify as the worthiest “global” artists, however, remain open to intense debate. I like Bourdieu’s notion of “institutionalized anomie” in this regard, although he used it in a different context. It’s vital to capture the ontological openness and contestation of meanings in global/transnational (cultural) spaces. Yet I also quickly realized that I couldn’t ignore the role power inequalities play in the global cultural arena, either. Take, for example, the persistent heavy concentration of influential art institutions and brokers in a few countries in the Global North, who critically affect the making of artistic careers and canons at a global scale (cf. chapter 5). In the end, I knew my research had to bring together both meanings and power structures. And that’s what I see as one of the advantages of a global cultural field approach that the book elaborates, among others—it allows you to pursue such a multidimensional analysis while also integrating multiple levels of analysis (macro, meso, micro) and scales. In short, it offers a uniquely integrative framework for studying “global culture” that doesn’t rely on overly unified assumptions, which could become too reified, if not outright Eurocentric at such a scale. Manning Zhang: The book title echoes Pierre Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art, which has become a classic in the sociology of culture. How is your global model different? What new things did you discover, and what methodologies did you use to discover them? Larissa Buchholz: As I emphasize in my work, a truly global sociology of art and culture cannot merely be an upscaling of established theories; that is, we can’t simply take an existing Western framework and superimpose it on the rest of the world. And this problem, of course, relates closely to questions involving conceptual methodology and theorizing. I’m indebted to those theorists who have encouraged us to think in ways that go beyond West-centric perspectives and epistemologies, e.g., Raewyn Connell or Julian Go, among others. I hope that related debates will gain broader traction after a period in which much of the discussion about global/transnational theorizing has centered on the critique of methodological nationalism. For my book, I relied on Critical Realism as a meta-foundation for strategies of explanation and generalization. I also discuss in an article how Diane Vaughan’s method of analogical theorizing offers one strategy for scalar theory extension that can help to circumvent deductive reification and minimize Eurocentric bias, which goes beyond Bourdieu’s own procedural suggestions. Researching the “global” is very easy to say, but it’s actually very difficult to do, and that is also due to issues involving empirical methodology. It’s no surprise the book contains an extensive appendix (laughs). Yet if I were to summarize my methodological approach in just a few words, then it was important to combine quantitative and qualitative methodologies in ways that integrate rather than combine macro, meso and micro levels of analysis. I aimed to create a research design that would realize the multidimensional features of the theoretical approach and make it possible to relate large-scale structural developments with fine-grained discursive dynamics and the richness and diversity of the experience of cultural agents “on the ground.” It was also critical to proceed as inductive as possible in my data gathering, building my theoretical framework not just from the top down but also from the ground up. In this regard, as a means to minimizing West-centric bias, I drew upon emic approaches for data collection, as, for example, when I created large-scale samples of “contemporary” artists, which is a category that can vary wildly across different world regions. Further, I utilized prosopography, a distinctive kind of research on collective biographies, to discern the social, cultural, and geographic features of the globalizing art economy in a grounded way. And while my primary research included fieldwork on four continents, I also went to great lengths to engage numerous secondary studies to explore multiple angles before I delineated any “global” patterns. With that much abbreviated methodological summary, let me point to a few key discoveries and how the global model differs from Bourdieu’s original framework. First, one of the central issues he explores in The Rules of Art is the division between “art” and “money” and how those differences play out in different subfields within the same cultural sphere. I certainly draw inspiration from that idea, but the way I theorize those divisions within a global context goes well beyond his initial framing. This is due to how they manifest amid new global institutions and infrastructures in unique ways. Bourdieu has no such theory. Further, my framework accounts for a new fundamental divergence between contemporary discursive logics of artistic evaluation and a globalized financial logic¾something else that Bourdieu’s field model lacks. But this isn’t just about uncovering a fundamental division in global art. More importantly, it’s about revealing a temporal pattern of increasing disjuncture and polarization, which runs also counter to existing interdisciplinary studies about art’s globalization. In fact, as I argue, a key reason for the polarization of art and money in a global context is the radicalization of art investment and speculation games, and the book provides a framework to explain how that process has come to operate across multiple continents. When it comes to particular works of art, I theorize how different types of artistic “universality” accelerate global flows among cultural experts or commercial circles in divergent ways. In light of these and other points, the book is not the modernist Bourdieu with a fresh coat of paint. It is a new study that theorizes how the perennial tensions between art and money have become articulated in novel ways in cross-border infrastructures, relations, and logics, for which Bourdieu’s original field theory is too narrow. As such, the book provides a model how institutions and intermediaries across the cultural and commercial spectrum connect and diverge in global transformations and valuations. In this way, we also can understand how alternative cultural circuits are able to resist the forces of commercialism and profit-chasing corporations that have been foregrounded in so many discussions about “global culture” in neighboring disciplines, such as media and communication studies. Of course, at the end of the book, I also emphasize that my model could be extended further with other potential logics and globalizing subfields of art production and circulation. Moreover, Bourdieu examined the art field’s genesis as a process of relative autonomous differentiation from other types of fields. But I’m more interested in articulating a different model that explains how a global art field arises primarily in the vertical differentiation from “lower” national or regional field levels. That dynamic creates a complex field configuration where global, regional, and national levels intersect and influence one another but where they also coexist relatively independently. A multi-scalar field theory not only extends Bourdieu’s field model, but it also helps us to move beyond any zero-sum conception of different scales in cross-border cultural production. This approach counters arguments suggesting that the rise of regional circuits in contemporary visual art would offset the outsized influence of global centers. In other parts of the book, I discuss some distinctive ways in which geography matters in a global cultural arena, an issue that I find particularly intriguing (and one which Bourdieu did not consider). At a global level, field theory in my study extends to a theorization of the inequalities among geographic macro entities (i.e., cities, countries, or regions). The unequal distribution of what I call field-specific forms of “macro capital” delineates a field’s symbolic or commercial geographies of power (i.e., its unique centers and peripheries, which can’t be reduced to the larger economic world-system). Even more intricate, however, are the distinct ways in which geographic classifications affect the circulation and evaluation of cultural goods. In a global context, we can no longer adhere to the exclusionary construct of a linear (Western) art history, which underpins Bourdieu’s theory of artistic “distinction” and innovation. My study reveals shifts away from a dominant paradigm of evaluating innovative art with time-bound categories to categories that are instead spatial. I propose a framework of four modalities in which geo-cultural classifications imbue art with meaning and value—sometimes in quite complex ways—which can be applied to other cases and art worlds. In short, I don’t see myself replicating or “globalizing” Bourdieu’s field theory. Instead, the book is really an attempt to chart new theoretical directions at the macro, meso and micro level, supported by a rigorous comparison of original, diverse, and multivalent data. Manning Zhang: How do you envision the future of cultural sociology? And what excites you the most? What advice do you have for graduate students and early scholars? Larissa Buchholz: Cultural sociology is a rich field with so many exciting directions and approaches. But personally, I’m excited that the sociology of art is currently such a vibrant and thriving field; many amazing books are coming out, and we’re starting to see increasing interest in transnational and global approaches. As indicated, when I began my project, there was very little material to work with, especially compared with the wealth of sociological research on the globalization of the economy or politics. So in a way, this increased interest is long overdue. I’m currently working with colleagues on a review article, and it’s clear there’s now an emerging subfield that has incredible potential for exciting new discoveries and theoretical innovations. I also believe the time is right for rethinking our tools and methodologies in light of both global, transnational processes and post- or decolonial perspectives. When it comes to advice for graduate students or early scholars, I would suggest that they do follow their passions in choosing their topics, but that they also pay attention to broader developments in the discipline. Even though the sociology of art is thriving, it’s still not necessarily considered to be a “bread-and-butter” topic among some sociologists. So while I believe students should always work on projects that excite them, I also encourage my advisees to frame their theoretical problems in ways that build bridges to other subfields. In my work on global art, for example, I’ve tried to contribute to the advancement of global/transnational field theory as a relatively new theoretical paradigm in global and transnational studies more broadly. Lastly, I’ve increasingly come to believe that work in the sociology of art can have practical relevance too. We have tremendous transformations in multiple art worlds and creative industries, and our knowledge could be valuable for cultural organizations and practitioners to navigate ever more complex environments. Economists have touched on these topics, though their approaches are usually much narrower, and humanists, by and large, tend to focus more on single artists or artworks. That means there is a unique niche where the sociology of art can make key contributions. For instance, in my free time, I’ve found it gratifying to translate findings from my research in advising nonprofit organizations or small galleries that help promote artists with nontraditional backgrounds or with origins in the “Global South.” I’ve learned that this process of translation does not mean to compromise genuinely theoretical or scholarly goals. It’s not a dichotomy, but about different forms of communication. Another issue from my research that I already mentioned concerns strong financialization trends in the art market, which has become one of the most unregulated financial markets in the world! As sociologists of art, we can contribute to raising awareness about such massive transformations and problematize how they affect broader structures and practices–and our very way of valuing human creativity. Although I don’t advise early scholars to engage in outreach too much, simply because their focus needs to be fixed on publishing, they can still select their research problems with an eye toward their potential public significance. Projects could be multi-dimensional. Thus, as I look to the future of the sociology of art, I definitely see a global wave in the making, which is being enriched by post- and decolonial approaches. And I believe that there are various opportunities for a “public sociology of art,” among many other important trends and exciting avenues! |
section CULTURE 