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Olav Velthuis
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Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology) Paperback – August 19, 2007

by Olav Velthuis (Author)
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How do dealers price contemporary art in a world where objective criteria seem absent? Talking Prices is the first book to examine this question from a sociological perspective. On the basis of a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including interviews with art dealers in New York and Amsterdam, Olav Velthuis shows how contemporary art galleries juggle the contradictory logics of art and economics. In doing so, they rely on a highly ritualized business repertoire. For instance, a sharp distinction between a gallery's museumlike front space and its businesslike back space safeguards the separation of art from commerce.


Velthuis shows that prices, far from being abstract numbers, convey rich meanings to trading partners that extend well beyond the works of art. A high price may indicate not only the quality of a work but also the identity of collectors who bought it before the artist's reputation was established. Such meanings are far from unequivocal. For some, a high price may be a symbol of status; for others, it is a symbol of fraud.


Whereas sociological thought has long viewed prices as reducing qualities to quantities, this pathbreaking and engagingly written book reveals the rich world behind these numerical values. Art dealers distinguish different types of prices and attach moral significance to them. Thus the price mechanism constitutes a symbolic system akin to language.

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  1. Part of series
    Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology
  2. Print length
    288 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    Princeton University Press
  5. Publication date
    August 19, 2007
  6. Dimensions
    6.25 x 0.5 x 9.28 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    0691134030
  8. ISBN-13
    978-0691134031
  9. See all details
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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
23 global ratings
bad item condition
3 out of 5 stars
bad item condition
Haven’t read the book yet. This review is only on the condition of the product.Purchased this book as NEW but it arrived dirty with folded pages and the corner of the back cover is even splitting. Secondhand condition with firsthand price, not worth it.
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Top reviews from the United States

Jacqueline Savaiano
5.0 out of 5 stars Demystifying Prices
Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2014
Verified Purchase
Substantive research as well as anecdotal evidence about worth of contemporary art and how prices for brand avant-garde art becomes inflated and way overpriced.
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MonsoonKing
4.0 out of 5 stars Explaining art world behavior with economic models.
Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2012
Verified Purchase
Velthius does a nice job taking the often curious behavior of art world players and explaining them with standard economic models. Why do dealers price primary market paintings at half their auction value? Why does a culture of favoritism and gift giving trump a transparent market model? How do dealers think about pricing the work of an artist for their first gallery show? Through a serious of interviews, data analyses, and observations, Velthius tackles these questions and many more.

The author pays particular attention to the competing worlds of aesthetics and commerce that must uncomfortably coexist in the art world. On the one hand, art world players insist that economic considerations are crass where beauty and scholarship should reign supreme. But at the end of the day, dealers are businesspeople who need to pay rent, support their artists, please collectors, and support themselves.

If you're hoping to use this book to price art or predict future prices, you'll probably be very disappointed. The book makes some very rudimentary empirical observations that should be obvious to anyone even casually involved in the art world (larger paintings are more expensive than smaller paintings for a given artist), but the author concedes that pricing is too idiosyncratic to hope to build anything approaching a robust pricing model.

While this book waxes academic, it should be pretty readable to anyone with a rudimentary background in economics. The art world jargon is kept to relative minimum. If you're looking for a breezy, entertaining read, I'd strongly consider  The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art .
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Terry King
5.0 out of 5 stars Still the best book on the subject
Reviewed in the United States on January 15, 2014
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I continue to reference this book in most of my professional writing and it will remain required reading in my firm.
One person found this helpful
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Yutong
3.0 out of 5 stars bad item condition
Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2022
Verified Purchase
Haven’t read the book yet. This review is only on the condition of the product.
Purchased this book as NEW but it arrived dirty with folded pages and the corner of the back cover is even splitting. Secondhand condition with firsthand price, not worth it.
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Yutong
3.0 out of 5 stars bad item condition
Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2022
Haven’t read the book yet. This review is only on the condition of the product.
Purchased this book as NEW but it arrived dirty with folded pages and the corner of the back cover is even splitting. Secondhand condition with firsthand price, not worth it.
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yi zhou
5.0 out of 5 stars a good
Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2017
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yes, a good book
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Hans Ryser
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2017
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Excellent
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Dr G Smith
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United States on June 3, 2017
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very thoughtful and stimulating
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Meghan
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2016
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Book is the s***
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Michalis
5.0 out of 5 stars Invaluable reading for any art market participants
Reviewed in Germany on October 21, 2023
Verified Purchase
A remarkable book that packs a lot of knowledge about the art markets of NY and Netherlands. The author approaches the subject from all sorts of angles with different types of analysis and goes in depth to understand how prices are formed in the art markets. This book has been an eye opener for me in terms of how art dealers operate and why they act in certain ways that seem erratic from a classical economic theorist's point of view. While I used to be negatively biased about art dealers as a collector of art, after reading Talking Prices I have come to sympathize with certain actions that they take to protect their artists and I have even started recommending this book to some of the artists I collect so they get to improve their understanding on price formation in the markets.
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Gabriele
5.0 out of 5 stars Interessaante
Reviewed in Italy on April 2, 2020
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Interessanti spunti.
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