Fashionability and the Art Market

Temporal dynamics of rise and decline are key drivers in the art world as a marketplace, and they often impact on art production, too. In his 1937 essay ‘Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian’, Walter Benjamin agreed with Fuchs’ critique that art historians did not sufficiently attend to ‘the question of the success of a work of art’. To some extent, this remains true today. It separates, for example, art market journalism covering fashionable artists and trends in the global art world from the scholarly discourse that later addresses the work of such artists, potentially inscribing them into the academic and institutional canon. According to Fuchs, ‘the uncovering of the real reasons for the greater or lesser success of an artist, the reasons for the duration of his success or its opposite, is one of the most important of the problems which […] attach themselves to art.’

This panel welcomes proposals that address fashionability or time-limited popularity in relation to: artistic styles or movements, individual artists or groups, or the impact of short-term trends on the decision-making of collectors, galleries and dealers, or arts criticism and art historical writing. Since fashions in the art world extend to works of art themselves, we also invite papers that cover fashion as garment: from the role a fashionable appearance can play for an artist to project contemporariness to concerns that might arise when an artwork represents a fashionable person. Proposals for papers can cover any geographical or cultural context, period, and artistic medium.

The format will be4 x 20-minute research papers, each followed by 5 minutes for questions.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Dr Stephanie Dieckvoss, Courtauld Institute of Art, stephanie.dieckvoss@courtauld.ac.uk   

Dr Anne Reimers, University of the Arts London, a.reimers@fashion.arts.ac.uk