The Value is a Story: How the Art Market Constructs its Prices

In the art world, price is never just a number. It is a narrative. It speaks of artists' reputations, dealers' prestige, and the perceived quality of the works. It is the result—and at the same time the driving force—of a complex interplay between culture and economics.

Olav Velthuis, a sociologist at the University of Amsterdam, explains this well in his book Talking Prices. His analysis overturns the common idea of the market: no longer a neutral place of exchange, but an environment where meanings are constructed and negotiated through stories.

According to scholar Kate Brown, galleries and auction houses don't just disseminate data: they strategically use it to shape aesthetic value and strengthen their position in the market. This is not arbitrary manipulation, but the recognition that value is, to a large extent, a narrative construction. Numbers, as Brown explains, are not neutral: they are selected, packaged, and communicated to build a coherent and authoritative narrative. Estimates of future values are based on veritable "well-crafted fictions" in which biographies, artistic genealogies, and selections of historical prices intertwine to create expectations and desires.

The Price as a Language

Velthuis clarifies it: setting a price is a cultural gesture. It is a way of transmitting meanings, of signaling prestige. A high price communicates not only the quality of the work but also who was the first to believe in that artist—a valuable piece of information for collectors seeking distinction.

The art market, with its often unclear or difficult-to-interpret rules, lives in a deep tension: on one hand, the need to legitimize itself as an autonomous cultural space; on the other, the inevitable involvement with commercial logic. But this separation, often evoked, is more ideological than real. Narratives don't simply describe the market: they construct it.

When a gallerist proclaims that an artist is "the most relevant of their generation," or when an auction house places a work alongside masters of the past, they are not just communicating: they are generating value.

Art and Fashion: Two Systems, One Shared Logic

Fashion works this way too. A Birkin bag isn't worth tens of thousands of euros for the leather, but for the story it tells: craftsmanship, scarcity, the aura of exclusivity. Haute couture shows—often loss-making—serve to legitimize the brand, more than to generate direct profits.

Both art and fashion construct value through similar mechanisms: scarcity (unique works, limited editions), genealogies (the masters, the archives), and identity (through possession).

But the differences are crucial. In art, uniqueness remains fundamental. Fashion, however, oscillates between uniqueness and seriality (haute couture vs. prêt-à-porter). The brand in fashion is a stable and recognizable player; in art, the artist's reputation is fluid and more vulnerable. Fashion has consolidated industrial empires like LVMH or Kering; art remains a fragmented ecosystem. And while fashion is now completely integrated into the mechanisms of global finance, the art market—as Velthuis and Erica Coslor remind us—maintains an ambiguous relationship with financialization: caught between internal resistance and structural difficulties, such as low liquidity.

Inventing a Market

In emerging countries—such as Brazil, Russia, and India—the birth of art markets was not spontaneous but the result of precise strategies, often supported by public institutions.

Brazil, in particular, offers an emblematic case. After the 2008 crisis, the Latitude project—born from the collaboration between galleries and the government—constructed a credible and attractive narrative for the international market: participation in fairs, publication of reports, and a network of relationships. The results were evident: in 2023, while the global market declined by 4%, the Brazilian market grew by 21%.

As researcher Dayana Zdebsky de Cordova observes, the question is not whether those numbers were "true," but how they were perceived. And perception, in the art market, can change reality. A gallerist says it clearly: "The art market does not exist in itself. What exists is what people believe exists."

The Truth of Fiction

Today we are experiencing a paradigm shift: from value to price, from labor to debt. Speculation has invaded the imaginary, and art is not immune to it.

Recognizing that price is a narrative does not mean denouncing a deception. It means understanding how cultural markets function. Institutions do not merely record value: they curate it, guide it, sometimes create it. This generates asymmetries, but also possibilities.

Knowing all this is liberating. When we buy a work of art or a luxury item, we are not just acquiring an object: we are entering a story. A story that precedes us, that we continue to tell, and that becomes real precisely thanks to our storytelling.

The art market does not hide this dynamic. On the contrary, it displays it. And perhaps it is this paradoxical transparency—the fact that everything is explicitly a construction—that makes it so fascinating.

Bibliography

Brown, Kate (2022). Art markets, epistemic authority, and the institutional curation of knowledge. Cultural Sociology, Taylor & Francis. Velthuis, Olav (2003). Symbolic Meanings of Prices: Constructing the Value of Contemporary Art in Amsterdam and New York Galleries. Theory and Society, vol. 32, pp. 181–215. Velthuis, Olav (2005). Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art. Princeton University Press. Velthuis, Olav & Coslor, Erica (2012). The Financialization of Art. In Knorr Cetina, K. & Preda, A. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance. Oxford University Press. Zdebsky de Cordova, Dayana (2014). Brazil’s Booming Art Market: Calculations, Images, and the Promotion of a Market of Contemporary Art. In Sansi, R. (ed.), An Anthropology of Contemporary Art: Practices, Markets, and Collectors.