Cultural Learning and the Emergence of Art Markets

Mohan Matthen (University of Toronto, St. George, University of Toronto at Mississauga)

Certain ways of engaging with art-works are more rewarding than others; these ways of engaging are selectively reinforced in consumers who try them out. In this paper, I examine how artists and consumers of art jointly construct new ways of engaging with art by selective reinforcement. The artist produces a work that is optimally engaged with in a certain manner and the consumer learns to engage with it in this manner. Conversely, audiences demand works that can be consumed in a selectively reinforcing manner and artists produce them. This is a market interaction that creates community-specific aesthetic values and explains the emergence of Lopes-style local "networks" in which there is a division of labour in art production and consumption. The essentially local scope of markets explains why art cannot be evaluated by pre-existent or universal standards.