{"title":"Who is on Show? Globalization of Private Contemporary Art Museums in China","authors":"S. Kharchenkova, Lisa-Marie Merkus","doi":"10.1177/17499755241246030","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Sociological research on global flows of visual art has primarily investigated artistic presence in the organizations located at the center of the art world. This article shifts the focus to a country outside the traditional center, as it investigates the nationalities of artists who have exhibited at the recently emerged private contemporary art museums in China. It demonstrates that Chinese artists dominate in their exhibitions, which points to a home bias. However, there is also evidence of a cultural hierarchy, with the dominance of a small number of European countries and the USA, and of the regional dominance of East Asian countries. The article demonstrates that a focus on a country outside the center enables us to see the prominence of regional cultural flows in the globalization of visual art. Moreover, it shows that private museums, which are relatively independent of state control, are an important venue to show non-Chinese contemporary artists in present-day China. The increase in non-Chinese artists in exhibitions over time, which is due to the establishment of new private museums, suggests the rising, albeit tentative, centrality of China globally in terms of the importance of its institutions. This article contributes to research on globalization in the sociology of art, and to the understanding of the dynamics of local and transnational cultural flows in contemporary China.","PeriodicalId":46722,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Cultural Sociology","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755241246030","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"SOCIOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Sociological research on global flows of visual art has primarily investigated artistic presence in the organizations located at the center of the art world. This article shifts the focus to a country outside the traditional center, as it investigates the nationalities of artists who have exhibited at the recently emerged private contemporary art museums in China. It demonstrates that Chinese artists dominate in their exhibitions, which points to a home bias. However, there is also evidence of a cultural hierarchy, with the dominance of a small number of European countries and the USA, and of the regional dominance of East Asian countries. The article demonstrates that a focus on a country outside the center enables us to see the prominence of regional cultural flows in the globalization of visual art. Moreover, it shows that private museums, which are relatively independent of state control, are an important venue to show non-Chinese contemporary artists in present-day China. The increase in non-Chinese artists in exhibitions over time, which is due to the establishment of new private museums, suggests the rising, albeit tentative, centrality of China globally in terms of the importance of its institutions. This article contributes to research on globalization in the sociology of art, and to the understanding of the dynamics of local and transnational cultural flows in contemporary China.
期刊介绍:
Cultural Sociology publishes empirically oriented, theoretically sophisticated, methodologically rigorous papers, which explore from a broad set of sociological perspectives a diverse range of socio-cultural forces, phenomena, institutions and contexts. The objective of Cultural Sociology is to publish original articles which advance the field of cultural sociology and the sociology of culture. The journal seeks to consolidate, develop and promote the arena of sociological understandings of culture, and is intended to be pivotal in defining both what this arena is like currently and what it could become in the future. Cultural Sociology will publish innovative, sociologically-informed work concerned with cultural processes and artefacts, broadly defined.