Beyond Talent: Networks Really Determine Success in the Art Market

Walk through Art Basel and you'll notice a contradiction. Women artists are more visible than ever. Around 40% of the artists exhibited at this year's fair were women. Yet the centre of gravity of the market still belongs to men. On the ground floor - where the world's largest galleries exhibit and where roughly 85% of the fair's total value is concentrated - male artists overwhelmingly dominate. Women are far more likely to be exhibited on the second floor, where visibility, prestige and market value are considerably lower.

The same pattern extends across the broader art market. Works by women account for only around 9% of global fine art auction sales. Only about 13 of the 100 highest-selling artists at auction are women. The auction record for a living female artist, Marlene Dumas is around $14 million, compared to more than $90 million for Jeff Koons. Women also remain underrepresented in major museum collections, blue-chip galleries and the secondary market.
The obvious explanation is discrimination.

What impact does discrimination have on the art market?

Collectors buy more works by men. Galleries represent more male artists. Museums exhibit them more frequently. If we could simply eliminate these individual biases, many believe, the problem would largely disappear.
For years, I believed that explanation too.

In 2018, my colleagues and I published a paper in Science demonstrating that artistic success is far more predictable than most people assume. We found that careers do not evolve randomly. Artists who enter influential institutional networks early in their careers are significantly more likely to become commercially successful later on. Reputation is not simply earned - it is built through networks.

That finding led to a new question. If institutional networks determine success, could they also explain why women remain underrepresented at the top of the art market?

Together with network scientist Albert-László Barabási and colleagues from Harvard and Northeastern University, I analysed the careers of 65,768 contemporary artists across 20,389 museums, galleries and art institutions worldwide. Our findings, recently published in Nature Communications, suggest that gender inequality is not simply the result of biased decisions. It is embedded in the very structure of the art world.

To what extent do institutional networks shape careers in the art world?

Artists do not build their careers institution by institution. They move through networks. Museums exhibit artists from particular galleries. Galleries repeatedly work with the same institutions. Curators collaborate with familiar organisations. Over time, these relationships create stable ecosystems that determine which artists gain visibility and which remain on the margins.

What surprised us most was how early artists become embedded in these networks - and how rarely they leave them. Those first exhibitions influence almost everything that follows: future museum shows, gallery representation, collector interest and, ultimately, the probability of reaching the auction market.

When we compared the influence of gender with the influence of institutional networks, the results surprised even us. A male artist exhibiting primarily within male-dominated institutional networks has a 73% probability of reaching the auction market. A female artist exhibiting within those same networks reaches 69%. But a male artist whose career develops primarily within female-dominated institutional networks sees that probability fall to just 52%.
In other words, the institutional network an artist enters predicts long-term success even more strongly than gender itself.

This does not mean gender no longer matters. Quite the opposite. Women remain disproportionately concentrated in institutional networks that historically receive less market attention, fewer collectors and lower commercial visibility. The inequality is real. But our research suggests that its source is more structural than previously understood.

This changes how we should think about fairness in the art world.

If inequality were solely the result of biased individuals, the solution would be relatively straightforward: encourage collectors to buy more works by women, persuade museums to organise more exhibitions and ask galleries to represent more female artists. These efforts remain important, and many institutions have made meaningful progress.

But our findings suggest that this alone will never be enough. The structure through which opportunities are distributed also has to change.

Greater equality of opportunity through new structures

Museums and galleries do far more than exhibit artists. They shape reputations. They determine who becomes visible, who enters influential professional networks and, ultimately, who becomes valuable in the market. By the time collectors begin competing for an artist's work, much of that trajectory has already been established years earlier.

The art world likes to believe it rewards talent. Our research suggests that success depends not only on what an artist creates, but also on the institutional network that recognises, amplifies and validates that work. If we want a more equal art world, we need to look beyond individual decisions and better understand the invisible structures that distribute opportunity. Changing those structures may be the most important step toward creating a fairer art world—not only for women, but for every artist trying to build a career.

The study ‘Quantifying institutional gender inequality in contemporary visual art’ was published in Nature Communications. Art market expert Magnus Resch completed his PhD at the University of St Gallen and currently teaches art management at Yale University. The author of “How to Collect Art” and seven other books on the art market lives in New York City. With Magnus.net, Resch founded an AI-powered app that is often described as the “Shazam for art”.