Artistic Communities: Strategies and Tactics of Creative Products Promotion in Petersburg Market of Contemporary Art

This paper considers the strategies and tactics that young Petersburg artists use to promote their artworks and provide communicative resonance around them. It presents the results of a research project conducted in accordance with the strategy of multiple case-studies: four artistic communities of different scale, structure, integration grounds, ideological orientation, professional background, forms of spatial embeddedness and artistic style were selected for analysis. In the course of data collection, a wide range of field research techniques such as in-depth interviews, participant observation and qualitative analysis of texts was applied.

The empirical data show that under the conditions of deficient sponsorship and information support, artistic success in Petersburg largely depends on the artists’ constant self-promotion efforts (participation in competitions and collective projects, applications submission, dissemination in Internet). By accumulating material, informational and reputational resources of their members, art-communities make convenient platforms for artistic self-presentation and development both in and beyond the local market. Responding to the specific noneconomic logic of this market where symbolic recognitions places before commercial success, communities produce unique strategies of defining target audiences, embedding creative process in urban contexts, choosing legitimate exhibition sites, opposing themselves to other artists and art-groups. Community membership helps artists cope with the risks of disintegration, isolation and insufficient information exchange imprescriptible for the small and highly competitive market of contemporary art in St. Petersburg and balance between the margins of creative products unoriginality and unrecognizability. Thus, artistic communities can increase symbolic capitals of individual artists serving as a peculiar kind of social lift and constituting one of the major forces of the social construction of artistic reputations.