Ups and downs of art commerce: narratives of “crisis” in the contemporary art markets of Russia and India

Abstract

This article develops an analytical framework to study the role of narratives in markets and argues that there is a relationship between the structure and composition of narratives produced by market actors and market dynamics. With respect to theory, the article bridges the perspectives that study markets as cultures and as fields and draws from the organizational studies approach to the analysis of narratives. Two empirical cases of the crises narratives in the emerging contemporary art markets of Russia and India illustrate the use of the framework. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with artists and art dealers as well as observations in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, New Delhi, and Mumbai conducted between April 2012 and June 2013. The article shows that there is a widely shared crisis narrative with a coherent structure in the Indian art market. In contrast, fragmented and contested stories that lack narrative structure dominate in the Russian art market. The analysis of the first case highlights the narrative structure and shows the productive work it does in the Indian market-it provides a moral justification of existing market norms and produces a perspective for the future. The analysis of the second case focuses on the context of narrative production and connects the conflicting interpretations of the crisis in the Russian art market to contested hierarchies and persistent uncertainty.Keywords Antenarrative . Indian art market . Market narrative . Market as culture . Narrative analysis . Russian art market Market actors tell stories: how they are better than their competitors, how a product is of an outstanding quality, how a company or industry is developing. These stories are aimed at customers, competitors, or even themselves (and researchers) and serve as sense-making tools. Exploring the production and circulation of meanings (Velthuis 2005;Zelizer 2010) or

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