Platform-enabled business models in the arts: The impact of digital transformation on visual arts networks

Economists and sociologists have long discussed value creation in the arts and the mechanisms explaining the exchange of artistic goods. While economic literature has shown how the impossibility of information in arts markets challenges the assumption of traditional economic analysis, sociologists like Becker and Bourdieu conceive value creation in these markets as socially constructed, with actors setting the internal rules of the art “worlds” or “fields”, building success and legitimacy on their relative positions and relationships. However, none of them accounts for the effect of the digital transformation in the visual arts, which has introduced non-human actors (i.e., digital technology) within networks, affecting their performance. As the actor-network theory (ANT) studies networks through the complex interaction between human and non-human agency, this chapter reconsiders an ANT perspective to the understanding of value creation in the visual arts. By classifying platform-enabled business models across visual arts organisations, we contribute to explain the effects of digital transformation and the diffusion of platform-enabled business models on network performance in the arts through shared value creation and enhanced trust.