“If You’re Not There… You’re Not There”: How Art Market Platforms Induce Status Anxiety to Coerce Participation

This paper, an 18-month ethnographic investigation of international art fairs (IAFs), shows how market platforms can have a coercive effect, inducing sellers (i.e., art galleries) to participate despite ambivalence over their value and anxiety over the process by which participants are selected. The key to this coercive effect, clarified via the contrast between “curatorial” art fairs and low-status “pay-to-play” art fairs, is that IAFs render visible a status hierarchy that is otherwise opaque. As such, galleries who seek to cultivate demand for their artist-clients from premier collectors come to feel they have no choice but to participate lest they lose visibility and thereby raise suspicion that they have lost their capacity to support their artist-clients and by default the collectors. The identification of this coercive effect offers an important theoretical advance, illuminating how it is not simply that institutions that exhibit a market’s status hierarchy reveals the status-based competition that is present in that market (Podolny 1993, 2005) or that institutional entrepreneurs can reshape market competition by publicizing an alternative ranking system (Esepland and Sauder 2007), but that the very construction of certain markets is rooted in how institutional entrepreneurs construct markets and platform extensions as status-exhibiting scenes and venues.