The networking of contemporary art fairs and galleries in Europe

Art fairs are establishing themselves as key hubs that affect the traditional value chain of the international market for contemporary art, mutually expanding and affecting the intermediary role so far played by art galleries. Therefore, it becomes relevant to consider art fairs and galleries from a network perspective, in order to understand these new relations and how they work. In this paper we focus on 28 art fairs in Europe, and the art galleries participating to these fairs during 2005-2015. By applying 1-mode and 2-mode network analysis, we investigate fairs’ and galleries’ centrality in the network and the network structure. Our results offer interesting insights about the importance of some fairs relatively to others, and how the network changed during the considered period. In particular, we show how the network has become more uniform nowadays compared to the past, when just one fair connected most of the network. At a structural level, we also study how galleries and fairs are directly or indirectly related to each other. We show a low density of the network structure, meaning that art galleries do not participate to a lot of fairs, and these are participated by common groups of galleries, making the network quite endogenic. This might be related to the geographical location of galleries and fairs, among other factors.

Zoom link: https://univr.zoom.us/j/84593804814