The Berlin art market: Structures and dynamics

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Constança Costa
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/26952
• topic: Berlin; Gallery; Collectors; Artista -- Artist; Art eco-system; Galeria de arte; Colecionador; Eco-sistema da arte

Every city has its own specific art-ecosystem which evolves according to the city’s political, economic, and social development. This dissertation studies the art market in Berlin, a city that changed and progressed tremendously in the last 30 years. My purpose in writing this paper is to understand this particular city’s art scene, its motivations, associations and ways-of-doing, as a way of comprehending how artists, gallerists and collectors inhabit this space together. In this dissertation I make a general characterisation of Berlin as a city, its political, sociological, and economic as well as demographic traits. I follow with a chronological delineation of the city’s art ecosystem, where I state the main actors and factors that have shaped the art scene to this day and how they interact with one another to create the very specific artistic context that can be found in Berlin. In the second chapter, I use Tanya Leighton Gallery, where I interned for six months, as a case study, thus giving practical and empirical information on the gallery’s artists, exhibition, and fair strategies as well as its methods and objectives. This case study allows me to understand how a Berlin-based gallery functions and how it relates to its community and artworld actors. I, then, conclude with a cross-referencing series of findings that guide me in answering the initial hypothesis of whether Berlin is more of a creative or a collecting city.