Art market stakeholders’ actions and strategies for the co-creation of artists’ brands

Contemporary art market is characterised by a strong complexity, due to the coexistence of several agents that influence both the value creation and the price formation. This complexity has implications on the distribution of information among the agents that operate in this market, where only few of them have complete information. Artist brands—the brand which is associated with the name of an artist—convey information about the artists and artistic quality of their artworks and help agents with imperfect information to infer the value of what they are facing. Studying this variable could then help better understand agents’ behaviours and market results emerging in the art market. In this chapter, we analyse a series of strategies and actions that art market agents implement to influence and co-create the artist brand, in order to build a road map for the study of the art market ecosystem under an agent-oriented point of view, moving the focus from the traded object to the agents who operate in the art market. Understanding how the artist brand is formed is the first step to develop an analysis of the relation between information availability and agents’ behaviour in the art market.