Collectively Producing Contemporary Artworks : Studio Work from Idea to Object

For recognized contemporary artists, delegating work to other professionals has become commonplace (Dubois 2024). Some artists, with sufficient financial resources, work in studios alongside highly skilled professionals. These professionals are rarely mentioned in the literature on artistic work, and their contributions to the value of the artwork are often overshadowed by the artist (Beech, 2015).

Based on a three-month ethnography in the studio of a Berlin-based sculptor leading a team of 10 professionals, combined with observations and interviews conducted at 12 other studios, I aim to explore the role of collaborators in creating the conditions for the effectiveness of the artist’s “signature effect” and, consequently, in the valorization of artworks. How does this collaborative work embed each unique piece within a collection of objects that share visual, material, and conceptual qualities associated with the same creator? In other words, since art is valued through the attribution of a creation to a particular artist, by what processes does a network of actors produce an object that is constructed as an expression of the artist's personality?

First, I will clarify the modes of contracting and organizing the work, showing how the studio adopts the neoliberal model of a networked enterprise, mobilizing personnel to carry out different projects simultaneously. Contemporary artworks appear not only as the result of project management (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2011), but also as "project objects" (Boutinet, 2008), whose realization requires a preliminary design phase. I will begin by detailing how the characteristics of the object in development are elaborated, starting from the artist's initial idea. Then, I will explain the operations that allow for its materialization. I will adopt an approach drawn from STS (Farias&Wilkie, 2016) to describe the work, tools, skills, and knowledge deployed to collaboratively produce a new object that bears the mark of its author.