When Art meets Money : Encounters at the Art Basel

The Art Basel is more than just a fair in the commercial sense of the word, more than a temporally and spatially concentrated gathering of dealers offering their goods for sale to interested buyers. It is at the same time the site of a display of »holy« goods in the pres-ence of thousands and thousands of believers, a pilgrim's goal for the ritualized adoration of modern and contemporary art. It is also, and for precisely this reason, the decisive wit-ness of the upheaval marking a radical change in that relationship between »art« and »money« - with all the consequences, not least for the evaluation of what is to be re-garded as »genuine« art. The present study, the result of several years of sociological field work, attempts to draw a picture of this change as perceived by the participants, the or-ganizers of the fair, the gallerists, collectors, curators, art consultants and artists, as a central problem of the contemporary art scene. The authors, members of a research group of the University of St. Gallen, present in When Art meets Money a detailed study of the practice of the contemporary »picture market«, drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu's influential sociology of art.