Abstract EN:

This doctoral thesis offers an explanation of the functioning of the art market in Japan. In eight chapters, it studies the action of the various actors – art galleries, artists, collectors, curators, art critics, auctioneers, but also department stores and newspapers (two peculiarities of this country) –, in order to understand why the part of Japan in the world exchanges of artworks remains weak, compared with its place in the world economy, and why the segment of contemporary art in this country still lacks institutional support and international visibility. Grounded in a fieldwork (for instance, more than sixty interviews of art producers and distributors, an exhaustive survey of 106 art galleries in Tokyo, and a participating observation in the artistic section of a department store), it shows that the lack of visibility of the Japanese living artists cannot automatically be attributed to a deficit of galleries : Japan indeed benefits from a dense network of art merchants, solidly implanted and full of variety. At the crossing point between several pictorial traditions – from China and the West –, she also can claim an original art production, and gain a competitive advantage from having experienced all the steps of the formation of a modern art market. However, the country has not been able to lighten the weight of a too much structured organization in the field of the traditional arts, which have their own mechanisms of certification of the value of artworks, still influence the formation of the taste, and beneficiate from a wide network of distribution. In a more cyclical way, the speculative bubble of the end of 1980s also durably slowed down the development of the Japanese art market.