Misattribution stigma and contagion: how did the art auction market react to Australian “Black art scandals”?

Tools

Fry, T. ORCID: 0000-0002-3763-5152 and Coslor, E., 2024. Misattribution stigma and contagion: how did the art auction market react to Australian “Black art scandals”? Journal of Cultural Economics. ISSN 0885-2545 (Forthcoming)

Text
2279255_Fry.pdf - Post-print
Restricted to Repository staff only
Download (637kB)

Abstract

In 1999, two major stories hit the media concerning the authenticity of artworks by two of Australia’s leading Indigenous artists. These incidents were quickly tagged as "Black art scandals," with both artists disavowing the production of the questioned works. We theorize the market impacts through the lens of stigma, given that, in the art market, uncovering fakes and forgeries can trigger panic among an artist’s buyers. Our proposed mechanism suggests that negative media attention surrounding misattributed works stigmatizes both the artist’s name and their artworks. Additionally, we highlight the potential for stigma transfer to other artists within the same style or genre (category-level contagion). Our results show a decline in the clearance rate and weak evidence of a drop in sales value for auctions held after the news stories broke. We propose stigma as a useful lens for future research in cultural economics.

Item Type:

Journal article

Publication Title:

Journal of Cultural Economics

Creators:

Fry, T. and Coslor, E.

Publisher:

Springer (part of Springer Nature)

Date:

15 October 2024

ISSN:

0885-2545