Creative visions: Presenting aesthetic trajectories in artistic careers

Abstract

Abstract How do creative producers present aesthetic consistencies and variations within their bodies of work over their careers? I address this question by drawing on over 100 interviews and over two years of fieldwork in the New York City contemporary art market. I examine how contemporary visual artists’ recognition and access to visual and narrative resources for presenting their works shape how artists draw formal and conceptual connections among their works. I show that uninitiated artists work to present strong statements of their creative visions, emerging artists strive to produce connected candidates for iconicity that signal the breadth and core elements of their creative visions, and established artists try to create associations with the iconic that link new work to recognized elements of their creative visions. The article extends sociological understandings of artistic content and careers by revealing the relational process by which producers, intermediaries, and consumers construct aesthetic meaning.