By: Lipsum123
People see art in different ways. Several different artists and professors have expressed their opinions through the times – a big topic being how to map the visual arts. According to Solhjell and Øien (2013), we divide the art-market into three categories:
- The exclusive circuit.
- The inclusive circuit.
- The commercial circuit.
When talking about art, most of us think about the big artists like Picasso, Munch and so on. These are part of what we can call the elite i.e. the exclusive circuit, looks a lot like the avant-garde market. This groups Is not for everyone, and many artists are excluded and often overlooked because they aren’t part of the elite, they are sort of less exclusive and not very well-known.
For the inclusive circuit there is room for more people. The main focus is community art i.e. the art is supposed to create social engagement. In April this year it was announced that the Columbus Museum of Art have gotten public funding to launch “the Center of Art and Social Engagement” – this is a great example for this circuit.
Last but not least we have the commercial circuitwhich has a lot of focus on the economic incentives. The main goal is to make money, and there is no focus on producing political or symbolic capital. Like the exclusive circuit, this group also fail on inclusiveness.
A big challenge in these markets is the big gap between the markets. Many artists tend to fail entering the exclusive or commercial markets because there is only room for the best – here it’s often the ones that make money and has high economic focusthat actually make it. It doesn’t seem like the more cultural and political artists have a chance. This leads to another big challenge – with the big gap and the exclusion comes a significant difference in artists incomes.
The top 25% earn a lot more than the bottom 25%. A lot of the blame is put on the fact that there isn’t enough demand, and many people think that there is an overflow of artistic labor. This creates a “winner-takes-all” market where a very small % takes a very high % of revenue – often the top 1-2% are left with the most. It seems like the elite are kind off selfish and want to stay at the top, therefore there is no space for the “lower class”. This is rarely discussed in social media. There could be several reasons to why this concern is left out; maybe it’s because the top percentage don’t want to highlight how “unfair” the art world can be, maybe it’s just because no one has the courage to make it a topic or maybe it just isn’t important enough to make it through the swarm of other important subjects in today’s newspapers.
Making sense of art and design industries 