Speaker: Professor Philip Roscoe, University of St Andrews
Title: The efficient frontier of the art market: speculative valuation and the art investor
Date: Thursday, 20 March 2025
Time: 10:00am – 12:00pm
Venue: Building 24, Copland, Room 1106, RSM Seminar Room
Anna Hartman is the host of this visit.
Abstract
Recent scholarship has explored how the art market has become increasingly driven by financial logics with artworks viewed as investments as well as aesthetic works. Art investment occupies a distinct epistemic field where specific calculative practices constitute artworks as valuable financial assets (Coslor & Spaenjers, 2016). These include price databases, auction catalogues, gallery work and categorizations (e.g. Herrero, 2010; Plante et al., 2021). A growing tradition of anthropological work, not fully recognized in accounting or market studies (Geiger et al., 2024) scholarship, has begun to demonstrate that calculative practices are also mechanisms of speculative accumulation, future oriented technologies centring on the extraction of value (Bear, 2020; Tsing, 2015). This work emphasises the narrative, affective and imaginative dimensions of such market work (Geiger, 2020; Gilbert, 2020; Roscoe, 2023). By this account calculation, or future-facing thinking, is the precondition of accumulation. We offer a study of the work involved in the transformation of the art market into a site of speculative accumulation. We analyse the discursive productions of the art market via a network analysis of lectures and podcasts offered by one key institutional actor in the field. Building on Coslor and Spaenjers’ (2016) account of calculative devices in the art market we explore these discourses both as an account of the field and as part of the performative works necessary to transform art into an investment. We highlight the speculative, imaginative and affective dimensions of these calculative devices, and their ambivalence to instrumental rationality. We suggest that these devices are better considered ‘accumulative devices’, a term that can contribute much to the theoretical repertoire of market studies.
Biography
I joined the University of St Andrews in 2009 as Lecturer in Management, was promoted to Reader in 2013, and Professor in 2023. I am currently Director of Research for Management, and have served as Director of Postgraduate Research and Director of Teaching.
Since arriving at St Andrews, I have been a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow (2016), and have published in leading sociology and management journals, notably Organization Studies, Human Relations, Accounting Organizations and Society, Economy and Society and Organization. I have monographs published by Oxford University Press, Bristol University Press and Penguin.
I am Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cultural Economy, having previously served as an associate editor.
I hold a PhD in management from the University of Lancaster (Institute for Entrepreneurship and Economic Development, 2007), an MPhil in medieval Arabic thought from the University of Oxford (1998) and a degree in theology from the University of Leeds (1995). From 2008-2009 I was assistant professor at Supdeco Montpellier in France, and before that a research assistant at the University of Lancaster, where I completed my PhD. From 1998 to 2004 I worked as a financial journalist and small-business owner.