Contemporary art: who calls the shots?(rich countries monopolize art market)

Despite the international veneer of the art market, research by French sociologist Alain Quemin shows that a handful of rich countries dominates the scene

How has contemporary art been affected by globalization?

Contemporary art lovers and professionals believe that it's becoming internationalized. Any gallery director, art critic, museum curator or exhibition commissioner would more or less agree that it would be absurd to take nationality or country of origin into account when judging an artist's work. All that matters, they say, is whether or not he or she is good. In other words, an artist's fame and market value should have nothing to do with nationality. As proof, those in the art world point to the fact that exhibitions and biennales are scattered around the planet [2] (they are even held in Havana, Taipei and Dakar), and to the rise of Asian artists after the Eastern European wave of the early 1990s. In contemporary art, globalization and its corollaries in the art world--cultural mixing and relativism--are taken for granted.

But do these claims match what is actually …