I experienced a very touching moment recently when a fellow artist was moved to tears by my response to his work. As a mature artist, he largely works in a vacuum and sharing his work with another artist was a meaningful experience for him. This made me question the perception of value in the work we produce.

Over the years developing my own practice, I’ve read all the usual experts online and in print and their advice on making it as an artist. I value these narratives and have benefitted from them, but it feels like there should be more. The insights and perspectives of a trusted peer is of much more value than we may think. Through this dialogue we see ourselves in unexpected ways, which can be invaluable. Developing trusting relationships of open discourse and commentary on one’s work and practice is what is so wonderful about the art school experience. And often, it is the thing that we miss the most when we leave.

However, looking critically at the mechanisms at work in building value in an artist’s work was the subject of an article by researchers Cloes Preece, School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London; Finola Kerrigan, Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham; and Daragh O’Reilly, School of Management, University of Sheffield. In “Framing the work: the composition of value in the visual arts,” published in the European Journal of Marketing, Preece, Kerrigan, and O’Reilly deconstruct the workings of an established art practice, looking at the elements that make up the successful art practice. They have used Damien Hirst as a case study because his worth is considered the highest of living artists working today. The researchers argue against the prevailing narrative that places an artist at the center of this value creation, arguing for a co-construction of value through social relationships.

Through their research, they identify the co-dependency that artists and others in the creation of value have on each other. The researchers write:

It is largely accepted and documented that recognition of art is a social process that cannot be reduced to a reflection of artistic merit and that this recognition is temporal (Baumann, 2006). Whilst the artist is the most important origin of a work, the hands through which the work passes and history of past relationships are essential in accruing value and status, thus the need to examine all the stakeholders involved.

What this signifies is that no artist is solely in control of their professional destiny. No matter how focused and disciplined an artist is to their practice, it takes the engagement of others to propel an art career forward, building value in the work. Interestingly, this signals an inherent weakness in the process of value creation:

The art market is, therefore, a historical and hierarchical institution based on social relations, making it difficult to predict, hence the failure of most art investment schemes (Horowitz, 2011). The social production of art (Wolff, 1993; Hauser, 1999; Alexander, 2003), thus, underpins a view of co-creation that is broader than the current thinking within marketing…Visual arts value is, therefore, composed of a number of values: aesthetic, cultural, social, critical and economic, which cannot be decoupled easily. These values come from the product itself, its creator, champions and experts who assign value to the work, contexts in which the work is placed and consumers who view and/or buy it.

It is on the basis of these social relationships that value is established. So, being social as a practicing artist is vital, not only online, but more importantly in person. The peer and professional relationships that we create can be significant in building value in our work, but also, we might be the ones to build value in the work of another artist!