How New York stole the luxury art market - Blockbuster auctions and bourgeois identity in Gilded Age America

Scholarship on the domestic art market has generally addressed questions of supply and the role of cultural intermediaries. By contrast, this study of blockbuster auction sales in Victorian America demonstrates that newly ascendant entrepreneurial elites drove changes in the art trade and further suggests that how collectors acquired artworks is just as critical to understanding consumer preferences and the shape and evolution of markets as what they acquired. The American Art Association provided this client base with a novel means of art consumption that articulated, valorized, publicized, and habituated more hierarchical concepts of social class than before the Civil War.