Artworks can vary enormously from one geographic location to another, with prices in major metropolitan centers often being higher than in other locales. An excellent ethnography of the international art market—tracing African tribal art from artists who are paid little for their wares, to middlemen dealers who send it abroad, to high-end galleries in Europe and the United States—is the aforementioned work by the anthropologist and art historian Christopher Steiner, African Art in Transit.
Art made within one national tradition may also sell for higher or lower prices in its home country. Some art-works may also have little or no value based on the regional market or due to national laws. Artworks considered national treasures cannot always be sold and exported across national borders, and thus the value of a work may be nothing to someone in a country that cannot acquire it. A classic treatment of the value of art, Richard Blodgett’s How to Make Money in the Art Market, discusses how smaller works that fit in a suitcase can be easier to buy and sell and thus be more desirable.
For a global, philosophical view on how art can be made, purchased, consumed, and appreciated in the tumultuous twenty-first century, the filmmaker Hito Steyerl’s Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War is worth examining. For a scholarly overview of how trade, taxation, and import laws affect value, see the collection of essays International Sales of Works of Art, edited by Martine Briat.
