Beyond Borders

Looking at the art market, it seems that a rule of thumb runs through its history: the more dealers or auction houses cross borders, the greater their market power. But is it that simple? How can we measure art market power? The most obvious approach is to measure the turnover of the different players and compare them to each other. However, to do so, one usually must get around a double difficulty – the culture of secrecy and access to private archives – while finding other quantitative and global indicators. Moreover, which ways and strategies of border crossing are used by dealers and auction houses? Regardless of the art market segment, the most obvious border crossing is to open a branch in a foreign country. But there are other, less radical, and lighter ways of developing outposts, such as travelling abroad. In the end, this book will enable readers to grasp the deeper meaning of the link between internationalization of players and their market power in a multidisciplinary way, from the 18th century to today.