Chinese Contemporary Art in the Global Auction Market charts the rapid emergence of a multi-million-dollar global market for Chinese Contemporary art by revealing the strategic activities of art world agents in promoting the work of ‘avant-garde’ Chinese artists to a Western audience.

Since the late 1990s, contemporary art markets have emerged rapidly outside of Europe and the United States. China is now the world's second largest art market. In counties as diverse as Brazil, Turkey and India, modern and contemporary art has been recognized as a source of status, or a potential investment tool among the new middle classes. At art auctions in the US, London and Hong Kong, new buyers from emerging economies have driven up prices to record levels. The result of these changes has been an increase in complexity, interconnectedness, stratification and differentiation of contemporary art markets. Our understanding of them is still in its early stages and empirical research in the field of globalization of high arts is still scarce. This book brings together recent, multidisciplinary, cutting edge research on the globalization of art markets. Focusing on different regions, including China, Russia, India and Japan, as well as different institutions and organizations, the chapters in this volume study the extent to which art markets indeed become global. They show the various barriers to, and the effects of, globalization on the art market's organizational dynamics and the everyday narratives of people working within the art industry. In doing so, they recognize the coexistence of various ecologies of contemporary art exchange, and sketch the presence of resilient local networks of actors and organizations. Some chapters show Europe and the US continue to dominate, especially when taking art market rankings and the most powerful events such as Art Basel into account. However, other chapters argue that things such as art fairs are truly global events and that the 'architecture of the art market' which has originally been developed in Europe and the US from the 19th century onwards, is increasingly adopted across the world.

In this study of Amsterdam's Golden Age cultural elite, John Michael Montias analyzes records of auctions from the Orphan Chamber of Amsterdam through the first half of the seventeenth century, revealing a wealth of information on some 2,000 art buyers' regional origins, social and religious affiliations, wealth, and aesthetic preferences. Chapters focus not only on the art dealers who bought at these auctions, but also on buyers who had special connections with individual artists.

Audience participation has polarized recent debates about contemporary art. This collection of essays sheds new light on the political, ethical and aesthetic potential of participatory artworks and tests the very latest theoretical approaches to this subject. Internationally renowned art historians, curators and artists analyze the impact of collaborative aesthetics on personal and social identity, concepts of the artist, the ontology of art and the role of museums in contemporary society. Essential reading for students and specialists, Interactive Contemporary Art offers a vital critical evaluation of interactivity in contemporary art.

In Anonymous Art at Auction, Anne-Sophie V. Radermecker takes the opposing view of the superstar economy by examining contemporary sales of Early Flemish paintings with unknown authorship and the effects of various substitutes for real names on price formation.

A unique history of the Australian art market since World War II. Van den Bosch traces the development of the Australian art market from a small, parochial outpost to its integration into the major international art markets.