Commodifying art, Chinese style: The making of China’s visual art market

Abstract

The economic value of art to cities and regions has recently been vigorously pursued and actively studied. The rapid ascendance of China as a superpower in the global art market and associated transformation of China’s art space, however, are yet poorly understood. This paper develops a Polanyian framework to interpret the spatial and institutional evolution of China’s art market, seeing the (de)commodification of art as a cumulative process embedded in geo-historical interplays of triple logics—cultural, capital, and political, unfolding within, and reshaping in turn, historically inherited spatial structures.