Abstract

The art market is increasingly a mediator between private and public sectors, creating new social values, engaging aesthetic transformations, promoting multicultural networks, fostering entrenched economic and financial outcomes. It is also a highly fragmented dimension and a moral mirror reflecting individualism and speculation for individualists and speculators, altruism and fairness for those seeking solidarity and socio-economic equality. Is art and finance ecosystem exerting epistemological mechanisms conceived to lead finance capital flows to escalate unequal wealth? Or, conversely, is the art market designing a participative architecture, a relational space where the artist’s critique is creating the aesthetic assemblage to erase any race, gender, class issues within an ethically accountable scenario? The global and Italian contemporary art framework is considered as a case study to evaluate such a complex dynamic and in-progress context.