Sociological description of art markets becomes explanatory only through diachronic narrative.

Evidence

But it is hard to see how sociological inquiry at that level would become explanatory: rather, the phenomena he is concerned with tend at once to reform into their own semiautonomous sociological level, one which then requires a diachronic narrative. To say what the art market and the status of the artist or the consumer are now means saying what they were before this transformation, and even at some outside limit leaving a space open for some alternate configuration of such activities (as is the case, for example, in Cuba, where the art market, galleries, investments in painting, etc., do not exist). fOnce you have written up that narrative, that series of local changes, then the whole thing gets added into the dossier as yet another space in which something like the postmodern “great transformation” can be read. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 868

Categorization

• QUESTION: The Cuba counterexample (no art market exists) is tantalizing — worth chasing what Jameson implies about alternative configurations and whether they’d disprove the dominant thesis.
• XREF: connects to: Performativity can only be judged through historical study of markets — Donald MacKenzie & Yuval Millo, Constructing a Market, Performing Theory, 47; Premodern Indian literary culture was polyglot; unilingualism came only with print capitalism. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1101