title: Ranking Art: Paradigmatic Worldviews in the Quantification and Evaluation of Contemporary Art
creator: Buckermann, Paul
subject: ddc-300
subject: 300 Social sciences
subject: ddc-700
subject: 700 The arts
description: While numerous studies have shown diverse effects of rankings, rather little is known about their production. This article contributes to a broader understanding of rankings in society, and does so by focusing on underlying worldviews. I argue that the existence of a ranking and its concrete methodology can be explained by the producer’s paradigmatic assumptions about a world-to-be-ranked. Referring to the sociology of knowledge and studies on commensuration, comparisons, quantification and valuation, I provide a general heuristic to analyze this relation between underlying worldviews and observational regimes through which order is constructed systematically. Presenting empirical results on a ranking for the most famous artists in the world, I show how the review device’s initial problem and its construction of order derive from consistent assumptions about contemporary art, its symbolic structures and its social embeddedness. These findings have implications for both research on rankings and sociology of the arts.
publisher: Sage
date: 2021
type: Article
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/article
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserverhttps://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/30219/1/0263276420972771.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00030219
identifier: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420972771
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-302196
identifier:   Buckermann, Paul  (2021) Ranking Art: Paradigmatic Worldviews in the Quantification and Evaluation of Contemporary Art.  Theory, Culture & Society, 38 (4).  pp. 89-109.  ISSN 0263-2764 (Druck-Ausg.), 1460-3616 (Online-Ausg.)     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/30219/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html
language: eng