TIAMSA member Mary Corrigall will launch her new art report on the South African art market at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa on Saturday 25th at 11am.
The South African Art Market: Pricing & Patterns offers an in-depth look at Africa’s dominant art capitals in South Africa; Cape Town and Johannesburg. How the art ecosystems in these cities are structured and the influences on them will be the focus of her talk at the Norval Foundation. The report offers an analysis of the gallery landscape and the pricing in the primary art market in South Africa.
The commercial gallery segment has expectedly experienced the highest rate of expansion across all art capitals in Africa over the last decade (Corrigall & Co, 2018: 133). It is not only local developments that have contributed towards this, but also the diversification and expansion of the global art market.
The structure of South Africa’s art capitals provide a blueprint for the natural evolution of an African-based ecosystem. This study reveals too the impact that such growth might have on an art community, as well as how segmentation and hierarchies occur, particularly when tensions between the local and global begin to bear down on and reshape not just the system, but also – one could argue – art production itself.
As an ecosystem evolves, points of differentiation within it start to become more marked. This demanded the establishment of classification schemes to understand the differences between artists and galleries and how those play out and shape the ecosystem.
The South African Art Market: Pricing & Patterns is the fourth publication issued by the Cape Town Based art research consultancy headed by Corrigall. Previous reports include; Contemporary African Art Ecology: A Decade of Curating, Top 50 Artists & the Top 20 Curators who validated them and Joburg Art Fairs. As these titles suggest Corrigall’s focus is on mapping and analysing shifts in the development of the art markets pertaining to contemporary African art.
The Norval Foundation is one of Cape Town’s most prestigious private art museums.
The South African Art Market: Pricing & Patterns is available in PDF and print formats at https://www.corrigall.org/pricingpatterns
For more information email the author: mary@corrigall.org.
You must be logged in to post a comment.