A Market Without a Market: Architectural Absence in the Global Art Economy

The global art market is one of the oldest and most valuable asset markets, and it lacks the institutional features ordinarily required for market coherence: standardised asset representation, public transaction records, aggregate price discovery, and persistent inventory accounting. This absence is commonly attributed to the subjectivity of artistic value, to norms of exclusivity, or to resistance to quantification. This paper argues instead that the opacity is architectural. The market lacks a shared market constitution capable of jointly representing supply, demand, provenance and realised exchange. Platform-level innovation — digital marketplaces, social commerce, provenance ledgers — fails not for want of adoption or technology but because platforms cannot substitute for missing institutional layers. The art market is characterised as pre-institutional: exchange without the coordinating structures that turn repeated bilateral transactions into a market system. ⭠The consequences run past price. Without a secondary layer carrying signal forward, value must be re-produced each cycle, and structural risk lands on artists — not as a social problem imposed on the market but as an endogenous property of its architecture. ▶ The paper's own strongest claim is that the market is not unconstituted but bifurcated: a small canonised tier in which value is stabilised by institutional capture, and a large tier that is pre-institutional. develops it.