The invigorating influence of relationship marketing on purchase intention in fine arts sector

PurposeThis study aims to determine the influence of relationship marketing on consumer behavior in the fine arts sector. Specifically, it examines the relationship marketing dynamics that significantly impact art enthusiasts' intention to purchase and their satisfaction with the artist.Design/methodology/approachThe proposed model was tested through the “structural equation modeling” technique to explain how and to what extent each variable affected purchase intention and satisfaction. Using a paper-based and online survey method to gather data, the authors analyzed 303 responses from art students, art collectors and art dealers in Mongolia. Eight hypotheses, including two mediating hypotheses, were developed and tested.FindingsThe results indicated that relationship investment and communication significantly influence trust, satisfaction and purchase intention, while trust significantly influences satisfaction and purchase intention. The study also assessed the vital role of trust as a mediator.Practical implicationsThe study's results provide insights that may help artists, art collectors and art dealers promote and improve the sales of their art products. The interactions demonstrated between the construct reveal essential implications for art marketers interested in relationship marketing strategies.Originality/valueThis study is the first to explore the application of relationship marketing in the fine arts industry.

Dutch Flower Still Life of 17th Century: Interest and Oblivion through the Centuries

Over three and a half centuries, the genre of flower still life created by Dutch artists experienced ups of interest and oblivion. There were the maximum assessment of society in the form of high fees of the 17th century artists; the criticism of connoisseurs and art theorists; the neglect in the 19th century and the rise of auction prices and close attention of art critics, manifested from the middle of the 20th century to the present day. In the middle of the 17th century, there was already a hierarchy of genres, based on both the subject and the size of the paintings, which was reflected in the price. Still lifes and landscapes were cheaper than allegorical and historical scenes, but there were exceptions, for example, in the works of Jan Brueghel the Elder and Jan Davidsz. de Heem. Art theorists Willem van Hoogstraten and Arnold Houbraken, resting upon academic tastes, downplayed the importance of still-life painting. Meanwhile, the artists themselves, determining the worth of their paintings, sought for maximum naturalism, and such paintings were sold well.In the 20th century, this genre attracted the attention of collectors in Europe and the United States. A revival of interest in Dutch still lifes in general, and in flower ones in particular, began in the 20th century, the paintings rose in price at auctions, and collecting them became almost a fashion. Art societies and art dealers of the Netherlands and Belgium organized several small exhibitions of still lifes. The course for studying symbolic messages in still lifes, presented by Ingvar Bergström, is continued by Eddie de Jong, who emphasizes the diverse nature of symbolism in Dutch painting of the 17th century. Svetlana Alpers, on the contrary, criticizes the iconological method and presents the Dutch painting of that period as an example of visual culture. Norman Bryson’s view of Dutch still lifes is formed against the background of the development of a consumer society, economic prosperity and abundance. Finally, there has been an increasing interest in the natural science aspects of flower still-life painting in the researches of the last twenty years. Curiosity, skill, and admiration for nature are the impulses that can still be felt in the images of bouquets and fruits.

Mrs. Rockefeller’s Exquisite Corpse

The “exquisite corpse” in this title refers to a gift book presented to Mrs. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in December 1931, which contains signed notes from Rockefeller’s domestic employees, friends, ministers, art dealers, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) employees, and also a signed painting by Diego Rivera. The book’s construction highlights the intersecting social networks and associations among a variety of religious, artistic, philanthropic, and domestic organizations and individuals that are more typically investigated as distinct or non-connecting. As such, the book invites an alternate reading of influences shaping MoMA’s earliest years. This interpretation takes inspiration from the surrealist games and conceits of ethnographic and artistic surrealism—an approach that is generatively suggested by the Tribute Book’s construction. Read in this way, I take the gift book to open up a range of associations that make possible modes of interpretation through which to consider the secular and the modern religious. I use the book’s intertextual qualities as an entry point into a new consideration of the presence and effects of liberal-protestant spiritual aesthetics in MOMA’s earliest years. I argue that such spiritual aesthetics shaped the secular museum’s curation, display, and interpretation of political artists including Rivera and European surrealists.

Considerations on the Function and Provenance of the Glass in the Plato von Ustinow Collection

The Russian émigré Plato von Ustinow – who settled in Palestine in 1862 and lived there until 1913 – was a keen collector of antiquities. In contrast to other collectors, however, von Ustinow did not purchase the objects from art-dealers. Instead, he appears to have worked with professional archaeologists, but also bought objects from local inhabitants in Jaffa and Jerusalem. His collection includes a substantial number of glass vessels: primarily blown vessels dating to the first- to sixth- or seventh century CE, i.e. the Roman and Early Byzantine era. The von Ustinow collection is comparatively homogeneous, and most of the objects are likely to stem from a relatively limited geographical area, as it closely resembles material from funerary contexts found in modern-day Israel. The collection includes a number of perfume bottles, small jars and kohl-flasks, objects most probably utilised in the preparation of the deceased before burial.

Art Worlds

Chapter 2 turns to contemporary configurations of the art world, its institutions, and actors. It maps how these actors relate to each other in Istanbul and Berlin and how they mobilize aesthetic theories in the form of pragmatic shorthand to describe their work. These vernacularized formulations of aesthetic theories also serve to reconcile conflicting understandings of art. In contrast to existing, if sparse, institutional studies of the art world that conceptualize art as a cooperative endeavor, the chapter details how structural dependencies, power differentials, and conflicting understandings of art permeate the daily workings of the art world. Showing that relationships between artists, audiences, critics, curators, and art dealers are frequently personalized through a friend/foe binary, it argues that motifs of amity and enmity serve to mediate structural dependencies and power differentials in the art world. A second mediating discourse, primarily employed by collectors and sponsors to deflect the periodic discomforts that arise around corporate sponsorship and the politics of collecting, reconciles divergent interests in art through the trope of art’s civilizing capacities. Within this trope, portrayals of art as a “greater good” that “serves the public” are framed in national terms despite the global connectedness of the art world.

In the Dark, All Art Dealers Are Grey: Discretion and Rationalisation in the Munch Art Market

In high demand among collectors worldwide, the art of expressionist painter Edvard Munch has been the object of numerous criminal incidents. This article examines to what extent these crimes have had any regulatory effect on contemporary trade in Munch’s work and what precautionary measures Norwegian dealers take to prevent illicit art from entering the market. Consistent with a grey market paradigm, interviews with art dealers indicate that the trade in Munch has become tainted with risk due to the presence of many unprovenanced works in the market, yet most art dealers have narrow, preconceived ideas of the ‘typical’ art crime offender. Interested parties would not expect questions of provenance to be answered, so they do not ask, and social relationships are used to excuse a lack of due diligence, conveniently allowing the industry to thrive.