Cultural Kaleidoscopes: Rethinking Art Market Formation in the Global South

Speaker

Larissa Buchholz

Larissa Buchholz is an associate professor of communication studies and sociology, by courtesy, at Northwestern University and a faculty fellow at Yale University’s Critical Realism Network. Her research examines culture, markets, and regimes of value from global and transregional perspectives and has contributed to the development of interdisciplinary approaches to global and transnational field analysis. She is the author of The Global Rules of Art, an award-winning book that examines how contemporary art became organized as a global field and how artists from historically marginalized regions achieve global recognition. Previously a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, she earned three master’s degrees and a PhD in sociology from Columbia University. Her scholarship has received national and international recognition, and she has delivered invited lectures and keynote addresses around the world. She serves as co-editor of Sociological Theory and trustee of the International Art Market Studies Association.

At #IAS_NUQ, Buchholz will work on a project that explores how contemporary art markets emerge and stabilize across the Global South, drawing on extensive fieldwork in China, Qatar, and Mexico. Shifting attention from institutions and intermediaries to collectors and art buyers, the project examines how new cultures of consumption and valuation take shape and help sustain cultural markets over time. It develops a new framework for understanding how domestic, regional, and global influences combine to shape distinct pathways of market development. By foregrounding Qatar alongside other Global South cases, the project offers new perspectives on cultural decentralization, market formation, and the changing geographies of cultural value in the 21st century.