What is an "Emerging" Artist?
This post continues my exploration of questions that arise from my research of the Sobey Art Award and its twenty-years of data on Canadian contemporary artists.
The word “emerging” conjures images of someone or something appearing out of a dense fog. Slowly a shape appears and only as it nears does it begin to take on a recognizable form. When the figure finally arrives its definition is discernable enough to identify what or who it is.
When the Sobey Art Award was established in 2002, the intent was to bring recognition to “emerging” artists in Canada. For that reason, the Sobey Art Award, like the Turner Prize in Britain, set an age limit on who could qualify for the award. The idea was that emerging artists were young people who were just starting out in their artistic careers. The Turner Prize set an age limit of fifty while the Sobey Award chose forty. But, age is a difficult measure for defining an artist’s career trajectory; an artist can become known or “emerge” at any age. By 2021 the organizers of both awards had dropped the age requirement. With no other formal measure of professional status how then is one to tell who is emerging and who has finished emerging?
After completing my research on the Sobey Art Award nominees’ exhibition records, I decided to try and sort out this question. Definitions of emerging artist are difficult to find. For a research project, one academic chose to define emerging artists as “those artists who have recently graduated, following their degree show.”1 Considering the results of my study of the Sobey nominees, this definition is problematic. First, not all artists enrol in post-secondary education and second all of the nominees for the Sobey Award had more than one group exhibition and often several solo exhibitions before they were even nominated.2
The Canada Council for the Arts (Canada’s government arts funding agency) does not even use the term “emerging.” Instead, they fund a program for “new and early career artists.” This terminology carefully avoids adjectives that suggest age or an active on-going transformation. The only age limit that applies to this program is that an artist must be at least 18 years old, the legal adult age in Canada. The other criteria for eligibility are as open-ended as the Sobey nomination requirements. Applicants must “have some training, experience or accomplishments in one or more of the Council’s recognized fields of practice” (dance, visual arts, theatre, etc.) and be “committed to the ongoing development of [their] skills and artistic practice.” What these activities entail are not explicitly defined but the institution makes it clear that “training” does not have to be “in an academic institution.”
Another Canadian organization, CARFAC (Canadian Artists Representation/Le Front des Artistes Canadiens), which represents the interests of professional artists in Canada, also avoids the term “emerging artist.” The only definition they provide is for “professional artist.” Here they adopt the International Artists Association’s definition and define a “professional artist” as one who:
earns a living through art making;
or possesses a diploma in an area considered to be within the domain of the fine arts;
or teaches art in a school of art or applied art;
or whose work is often seen by the public or is frequently or regularly exhibited;
or is recognized as an artist by consensus of opinion among professional artists.
At least one or more of these criteria would easily fit every one of the Sobey nominees. Does this mean none of them are emerging? Or, can an emerging artist also be a professional artist? And, is a professional artist the same as an “established” artist, a term that is often used to describe a bone fide artist?
In a 2019 Canadian Art Magazine article Alison Sinkewicz tried to puzzle through these questions. She concluded that there is no consensus on how the term emerging is applied. Every “branch of the art world — the market, public galleries and funding institutions—have varying benchmarks to qualify as ‘emerging’ and, finally, to emerge.” But even these “benchmarks” are not definitive. In the commercial art market, an artist might have finished emerging and become established with a solo show and sales of their work. Or, in the world of public institutions, an artist may have emerged after their first solo show in an artist-run centre. But, then again in both cases the artists may still be considered to be emerging.
A Sobey Art Award nomination may be another marker for gauging if an artist has emerged. Bridget Moser was nominated and shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2017. As she tells, Sinkewicz, she is not sure what this status means.
“Now I feel that I can’t use the word ‘emerging’ anymore, but I don’t know what that means,” Moser says. “If the Sobey Art Award hadn’t happened, I probably would categorize myself that way.”
As Sinkewicz notes, Moser has “a long list of institutional exhibitions and gallery performances at venues such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, Mercer Union and the National Arts Centre.” These accomplishments suggest she was already emerging if not fully emerged even before her nomination.
With no clear definition and no exams or a completion of a formal internship, there is no single objective measure of when someone has become an artist. While designations like “emerging,” “mid-career” and “established” imply staged professional standards, the steps between and the points of final arrival are never fully defined or tested.
The one constant and objective form of recognition that artists participate in are exhibitions. An exhibition publicly confirms that an artist has been recognized by the artistic community (the first circle of recognition as per Alan Bowness).3 Group exhibitions confirm an artist’s place in the artistic community and align an artist with other artists working in similar media or genres. A solo exhibition is even more significant as it asserts an artist’s singularity, and publicly declares their creative difference and individual identity as an artist. Exhibitions then provide the best indicator of an artist’s emergence, recognition, and status in the Art World.
Art databases, Artfacts.net and KunstKompass, have realized the value of exhibitions as an objective measure of an artist’s place in the contemporary art world. These databases collect and use exhibition records, rather than sales data, to gauge the recognition of contemporary artists.4 At Artfacts, each exhibition — as well as each award and publication about an artist — is given a weighted score depending on the type of show (solo or group or biennale), and the significance of the venue, award, or publication. A group exhibit in the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, for example, would score higher than a group exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery and an article in ArtForum would rank higher than a review in a local newspaper. In recent years, Artfacts also began charting who an artist exhibits with and gives a greater value for sharing exhibition space with a well-noted artist. The scores are then processed by Artfacts’ algorithm which then gives each artist a ranking number; the lower the number, the higher the rank. The most renowned and “established” artists are in the top 100.
To understand how Sobey nominees are ranked in this form of measure, I documented the Artfacts ranking of each shortlisted artist the year of their nomination and again in 2022.5 All but two of the shortlisted artists were documented on the database.6 This suggests that, on the whole, the nominated artists had had at least one notable exhibition that met Artfacts’ criteria prior to their nomination. This would suggest that any one of the Sobey nominees was known in the contemporary art world and therefore might be considered as having emerged or emerging.
The artists’ individual Artfacts rankings indicate how varied this emergence can be. The nomination year rankings across the list range from 1,000 (artists closer to the top 100) to 131,000 (artist farther from the top 100) while the 2022 rankings include artists ranked as low as 465,000.7 None of the shortlisted Sobey artists were ranked in the top 100 in the year of their nomination or in 2022. Only two artists with the highest ranks – Marcel Dzama (452 in 2004 and 290 in 2009) and Terence Koh (492 in 2008) – came even close to this top tier of recognition in their nomination year. By 2022, only three other artists – Jon Rafman (2015 and 2018) with a score of 348, Jeremy Shaw (winner 2012) with 639 and Kapwani Kiwanga (winner 2018) with 268 – reached the top 1,000 along with Dzama. Koh’s ranking, on the other hand, dropped to 3,737.
The rankings of the 18 Sobey Art Award winners on the chart help to illustrate the wide variation in rankings between artists. This is consistent throughout the list of all shortlisted artists and the selection of final winners does not indicate a preference for artists with a higher Artfacts ranking. In fact, many longlisted artists have better Artfacts rankings than the shortlisted artists. The list also illustrates how an artist’s ranking can improve or decline over the years. Winning the Sobey Art Award, however, while not a guarantee of a better Art World ranking, appears to improve the ranking of some artists. Half of the winning artists have a higher ranking in 2022 while only 18 out of 85 (or 21%) shortlisted artists from 2002 to 2021 show similar improvement.
Artfacts also provides a way to chart the top artists in a given nation although the data on nationality is not always consistent. Nationality is recorded on the artists’ profiles but sometimes this information has not been documented or the artist is assigned the nation of their birth rather than Canada (Abbas Akhavan (winner 2015), for example, is documented as an Iranian artist). It is also important to note that the national ranking is based on Artfacts global data and thus Canadians are ranked within the international rather than the national Art World. This means that people in the Canadian Art World may be more familiar with Annie Pootoogook or Brian Jungen than Kapwani Kiwanga. Kiwanga ranks higher on Artfacts than Pootoogook. Prior to her nomination, Kiwanga had very few exhibitions in Canada but many in Europe which would have contributed to her higher Artfacts ranking. A Canadian artist then may emerge and be well-recognized in Canada but not necessarily enjoy the same recognition in the primary artistic centres of the contemporary art world.
Exhibitions, publications, awards, and exhibiting relationships between artists are, for Artfacts, the objective markers of an artist’s visibility in the Art World.8 Their data provides a unique picture of an individual artist’s career trajectory over time, from initial emergence (their first recorded exhibition, for example) to their position as an “established” artist – that is an artist who has arrived, is known, and is fully identifiable. There is no doubt that artists like Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, Ai Weiwei, and Yayoi Kusama, who are ranked within the top 100 worldwide artists, have arrived. Each of them is recognized not only for their work but also for their persons as artists. Their artistic identities are “established” and no longer questioned.
Emerging, a word that defines an incomplete and on-going action, is a good descriptor for the transformative progression that artists engage in as they seek recognition in the Art World. Emerging begins as soon as an artist has exhibited artwork in a reputable venue and continues as a dynamic progression over time, sometimes for an entire lifetime. Emerging then ends only when the Art World sees the artist and recognizes the unique identity of their work and their person.
I.R. Fillis, B. Lee, and I. Fraser, “The role of institutional relationships in shaping the career development of emerging artists,” Arts and the Market (2022), http://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/17263
Alan Bowness, The Conditions of Success: How the Modern Artist Rises to Fame (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989).
Marek Claassen, “Artfacts.Net,” Leonardo, Vol 45, No 3 (2012): 278-279.
The shortlists over the twenty years of the award include 90 artists total, some of whom were nominated more than once. My analysis is based on including duplicate nominations. I would like to acknowledge Artfacts’ generousity in providing me with free access to their database in 2022.
There was no Artfacts record for Jean-Denis Boudreau (2007) and Krystle Silverfox (2022). This does not mean that these artists had no appropriate exhibitions. Artfacts only records what they are given and verify. Artists and galleries can open an account and submit information but the processing takes time. Thus, an Artfacts artist profile may not include all appropriate exhibitions.
The increased range can be attributed to the fact that Artfacts, since its founding in 2003, has added more and more artists. In 2023, Artfacts collected data on just of over one million exhibitions, nearly one million artists, and 26,000 galleries and 8,600 museums.
Other scholars have considered how artists gain recognition in the Art World. Wouter de Nooy (“The dynamics of artistic prestige,” Poetics 30 (2002): 147-167) takes prestige as a measure of recognition and discusses how prestige is built on “past successes” (i.e. past exhibitions) and an artist’s “affiliations” with others in the Art World. He proposes that the more important and prestigious the exhibiting venue, the more prestige is accrued to the artist and vice versa. An important artist can also enhance the prestige of an exhibiting venue.
Benedict Martin (“How Visual Artists Enter the Contemporary Art Market in France: A Dynamic Approach Based on a Network of Tests,” International Journal of Arts Management, Vol. 9, No, 3 (Spring 2007): 16-33) also explores this question by conducting a case study of young French artists. He tracked their various achievements or instances of recognition as they entered the art world in France – exhibitions, grants, and so on. He discusses these activites and achievements as “passing tests” that gradually prove the artist’s worth and helps to move their career trajectory on to better venues and better recognition.
In both cases, Artfacts can be understood as documenting and tracking these same objective activities which then measure an artist’s level of prestige, career accomplishments, or recognition.