Track: Sustainability in Operations and Supply Chain

Abstract

Although art plays a crucial role in socio-cultural development and sustainability, in today’s economic system, many artists struggle in maintaining their financial stability, and continuing their artistic productions and careers. Addressing this issue, the present research aims to promote the sustainable development of art industry by providing guidance and insights not only for artists, but also for the other industry stakeholders such as curators, gallery owners, collectors and art investors. With this aim, first, to understand artwork pricing dynamics, we review the supply chain relationships in art industry. Then, as a collaborative effort with a contemporary art gallery in Istanbul, we study the factors that have the potential to influence artwork prices by using correlation analysis and multiple moderated regression models. Unlike most of the previous studies that typically employ auction prices, we focus on the gallery prices of artworks, and analyze the joint impacts of both artist and artwork related factors that have not been studied yet. By interpreting the findings obtained from the analysis, we propose several data-driven strategies, especially for young and enterprising artists, enabling them to generate certain amount of income from their artworks, and thus improve their economic sustainability.