Careers in the global art field: Geo-capital and globalizer venues in the consecration of Central-Eastern European artists

Abstract

In our contemporary art field global institutional networks offer novel strategies for peripheral artists in their struggle for global recognition, bypassing the necessity of maximizing presence in the territorial core. We address the puzzle of how such novel artistic strategies bypassing core gatekeepers can succeed. In this article we analyze the way artists from Central-Eastern Europe strive for consecration via acquisition by the pinnacle museums – Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou and the MoMA – between 1990 and 2018. Our analysis is based on more than hundred thousand exhibition events of about 3500 artists, held at nearly ten thousand venues in 112 countries. We focus on network topology of co-exhibiting relations of venues and artists. We introduce two key concepts to understand success in the multiscalar global art field: geo-capital and the globalizer position. Geo-capital measures the territorial balance of a venue's topological neighbours, capturing a capacity to span boundaries, while the globalizer position marks those venues that can provide artists with global visibility against the territorial core-periphery spectrum on topological grounds. We show that a strategy built on venues in the globalizer position improves the likelihood of consecration more than any other factors. We contribute to prior research by showing the functioning of a relational form of territoriality, that relies on global networks, and provides a mechanism through which global institutional networks can function in relative vertical autonomy within the multiscalar global art field.