Olav Velthuis

University of Amsterdam | UVA · Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data, this article explores the extent to which Western art markets are globalized by focusing on the nationality of contemporary artists represented by art galleries in Amsterdam and Berlin. Far from the borderless world presupposed in the globalization literature as well as by art dealers themselves, g...

The financialization of art merits the attention of social scientists studying finance for a number of reasons. First of all, in spite of the fact that the investment potential of art has long been recognized (section one), its recent financialization has been resisted by both members of the art world and of the financial markets. Members of the ar...

Based on wardrobe interviews', this article studies how young Dutch men dress themselves. We argue that existing sociological studies of clothing have gone too far in emphasizing the symbolic aspects of clothing and have not paid sufficient attention to the role of routines and rules in daily dressing. Moreover, we find that young Dutch men dress r...

This article analyzes determinants of prices in the Dutch fiction book market between 1980 and 2009. It does so on the basis of interviews with editors of large publishing houses and regression analysis of a dataset that contains prices and their determinants of over 80 000 fiction books. We show that material properties such as the size, binding a...

This article studies the role of judgment devices in the emergence of markets for singularities. In particular, it seeks to understand how specific judgment devices become dominant in resolving uncertainty within these markets. Building on Karpik’s seminal theory, we argue that institutional environments (e.g. government regulations, political econ...

In this article, we examine how models working on Chaturbate, one of the world’s most popular adult webcam platforms, negotiate and make sense of the dynamic ways in which this platform configures their competitive environment. By combining different perspectives from the field of economic sociology, we demonstrate how competition on Chaturbate is...

The paper studies how local contexts contribute to the emergence of markets. In particular, it explains how potential entrepreneurs are motivated to become active in establishing new markets. Empirically, the focus is on contemporary art markets in two emerging countries: India and Russia. The paper draws upon qualitative interviews with 65 contemp...

It’s the arts, stupid - Hutter Michael , The Rise of the Joyful Economy. Artistic Invention and Economic Growth from Brunelleschi to Murakami (London/New York, Routledge 2015) - Volume 57 Issue 3 - Olav Velthuis

Based on 4 years of work experience in a newsroom, this article analyses in detail how news interviews are produced at the business desk of a Dutch daily newspaper. It focuses on the power dynamics, multiple social interactions and reciprocal exchanges which govern its production. The main case is an interview conducted with the president of the Eu...

In the 1990s central banking in Europe and the United States witnessed a paradigm change. A central tenet of the new paradigm was that a central bank which acts in a transparent and predictable manner reduces uncertainty for economic actors and will be better able to control inflationary expectations. Thus, central bankers set out to enhance their...

Since the late 1990s, contemporary art markets have emerged rapidly outside of Europe and the United States. China is r s1the world's second largest art market. In counties as diverse as Brazil, Turkey and India, modern and contemporary art has been recognized as a source of status, or a potential investment tool among the new middle classes. At ar...

This chapter explores why official art organizations—artists associations and art academies—which regulated artistic production in Soviet Russia and Maoist China, continue to survive despite changing environments and the development of art markets in these countries. This chapter observes path-dependent processes and instances of institutional comp...

https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7002274637

This chapter illustrates different regimes of justification by tracing the evaluative biography of two Chinese contemporary art styles, in order to explain their artistic and commercial success. The movements developed in the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre, when censorship of contemporary art was strengthened, forcing these artists to remain u...

In veel statistieken is fitness de meest beoefende sport in Nederland. De dominante verklaring hiervoor is dat mensen in een geïndividualiseerde cultuur meer gericht raken op het uiterlijk en de gezondheid. Met behulp van fitness kan het lichaam worden getraind en in de gewenste vorm gebracht. Ten tweede past fitness in een rationele en doelger...

De Nederlandse samenleving maakt een periode van ingrijpende verandering door. Althans zo lijkt het. Het omroepbestel moet op de schop, de oordelen van rechters worden in twijfel getrokken, de burger ervaart een diepe kloof met de politiek, de kranten weten zich niet meer van hun voortbestaan verzekerd en de kerken zijn leeggelopen. De uitgave 'So...

This article provides an ethnographic account of newspaper coverage of a trade summit which took place in Geneva in the last days of July 2004. One problematic aspect of covering news events at international economic institutions such as the World Trade Organization is the phenomenon of mediated mediation: whereas the role of journalists is to medi...

How do dealers price contemporary art in a world where objective criteria seem absent? Talking Prices is the first book to examine this question from a sociological perspective. On the basis of a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including interviews with art dealers in New York and Amsterdam, Olav Velthuis shows how contemporary art...

Austrian economists have repeatedly argued that the price mechanism is not just an allocative, but also a communicative system: as a solution to the dispersed knowledge problem, prices convey meanings which serve as guideposts to economic action. The analysis of these meanings has been restricted to economic meanings such as profit opportunities an...

This article develops a sociological analysis of the price mechanism on the market for contemporary art. On the basis of in-depth interviews with art dealers in New York and Amsterdam, I address two pricing norms: one norm inhibits art dealers from decreasing prices; the other induces them to set prices according to size. To account for these prici...

We analyse determinants of prices for contemporary art with the help of quantitative data. The focus is on gallery rather than auction prices in the Netherlands. We model the determinants of prices on three different levels: the work of art (size, material), the artist (age, sex, place of residence, institutional recognition), and the gallery (loca...

This comment is in response to Frederic L. Pryor (2000). “The Millennium Survey: How Economists View the U.S. Economy in the 21st Century.”The American Journal of Economics and Sociology. 59 (January), pp. 3-33.

Abstract In his early work. Talcott Parsons severely criticized Old Institutional Economists like Thorstein Veblen and Clarence Ayres. Parsons’main objection was that institutional economics had a misconceived view on the scope of economics: institutions, being the embodiment of values, were the proper subject of sociology rather than economics. By...