Art Collectors and the Valuing of Contemporary Art: Crafting Visual Environments, Ordering the Inner World, and Falling in Love

Ann Mullen, University of Toronto

Sociological research on the consumption of art typically focuses on the meaning-making practices of museum or art gallery visitors. Largely missing in this research has been a consideration of collectors’ relationships with the art in their homes. In this paper, I draw on in-depth interviews with 19 contemporary art collectors in San Francisco, California, to investigate how and why their art holds meaning and the evaluative schemas respondents employ in assessing their collections. I argue that the consumption of art entails two distinct activities: evaluation and meaning-making. Building on Dewey’s conception of valuation as encompassing both appraising and appreciating, my findings show that respondents employ three lenses of evaluation: legitimacy, or the question of whether a piece counts as valid and reputable; art historical value, or how well a piece connects to the art historical “conversation”; and, most importantly, what I term domestic evaluation, or how well a piece relates to the principle themes of their collection. In building collections, respondents create distinctive visual environments which represent how they see and know the world. These domestic cosmologies afford respondents a means to visually and intellectually narrate their lives in coherent and meaningful ways (Sennett). While evaluative judgements reside in a cognitive, discursive space, respondents shift to emotional, visceral and embodied descriptions when relaying their appreciation for their collections. Here the value resides in the sense of living in a visually stimulating environment and the “felt sense” of their homes. Respondents describe falling in love with art or art pieces serving as the “hearth of the house.” These findings expand sociological understandings of how and why art holds meaning and value and underscore Johnson’s (2007) argument that analytic accounts of mind and language neglect the ways in which emotion and feeling lie at the heart of our capacity to experience meaning.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 174. Interpretation and Social Order