Fåfängans Marknad : En studie över konstköp som överföring av kulturellt kapital och dess effekter på konstmarknaden

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines the art market as a social space in which the act of purchase or acquisition, rather than the artwork itself, constitutes the primary object of desire and vessel for capital transfer. Drawing on Bourdieu's field theory, Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality, Barthes's semiotics and Actor-Network Theory, the study analyses how the art purchase functions as a sign enabling the conversion of economic capital into cultural capital, and asks: within which habitus do the social conditions arise that render this conversion legitimate, and which type of art operates most effectively as its medium? The analysis shows that the purchase of art is a performative, symbolic act whose meaning is constituted within a habitus defined by shared codes and collective recognition, a self-referential system of signs that reproduces and legitimises itself independently of any artwork's intrinsic aesthetic qualities. Abstract and conceptual art emerges as the most effective instrument for this transfer: abstraction enables a free projection of identity onto the work, while its interpretive difficulty sustains the social distance on which symbolic value depends. The thesis concludes that the contemporary art market could, in essence, be seen as a market of vanity. Not in a moralistic sense, but in that the self is consistently at stake in every transaction, and each purchase is an investment in a narrative of who one is and wishes to be seen as.