CULTURAL PRACTICES IN THE CONTEMPORARY UKRAINIAN ART MARKET: THE FORMATION OF ARTISTIC VALUE AS A PROCESS OF MEANING-MAKING

Abstract

The author offers a cultural-studies analysis of the contemporary Ukrainian art market through the lens of cultural practices understood as mechanisms for the formation of the cultural value of art. The art market is examined not as a set of events or economic transactions, but as a cultural field within which the significance of art is shaped through regular practices of interpretation, selection, presentation, and reception. Particular attention is given to the event-based level of the contemporary art market, analysed as an autonomous form of public actualization and intensification of cultural value. The article shows that, under conditions of the still-incomplete institutionalization of the Ukrainian art market, cultural value does not acquire stability on its own but emerges as a complex process of meaning-making that requires the continuous reproduction of practices sustaining significance. This approach makes it possible to conceptualize the Ukrainian art market as a cultural institution in the process of formation, where the event-based level coexists with the variability of criteria of cultural recognition, and where the significance of art is produced through the interaction of expert mediation, spatial and organizational forms, public reception, and trust. The argument is based on an analysis of event-based, institutional, expert, and receptive cultural practices in the contemporary Ukrainian art market.