ABSTRACT / This research aims to show how integrating network analysis with social sequence analysis may enable historical social science to capture the unfolding of semi-rare social events. Thematically the presentation will connect to the discourse on the social institution of canon formation. It will analyze the ways art of the semi-peripheral region of Central and Eastern Europe is represented through hub museum collections in artistic centers of the global art world.
Doing so I built a dataset comprising all acquired artists in three arguably core collections; the Tate in the UK, the MoMA in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris along with a complementing dataset comprising more than 100 000 exhibitions of more than 3000 non-acquired CEE artists. Network analysis enables to grasp multiple and complex positional features in the change of the social networks of both the artists and the collections in different time periods. Sequence analysis enables to detect patterns in the continuity and interdependence of events to identify dominant routes of action within the field. Comparing artists’ exhibition histories with sequence analysis based on categorizations derived from integrating multiple network analysis-based characteristic to typical constructions of their social networks at given timeframes enables thus to show specific routes of transformation throughout the artists’ and the collections’ histories. The research aims to contribute to the discourse deconstructing a naturalized notion of canon-formation while connecting micro-meso and macro levels of the process. The presentation will be on an ongoing research.
BIO / Júlia Perczel is a PhD candidate at the Department of Network and Data Science at CEU. Holding an MA in Art History and in Social and Organizational Psychology, she is interested in integrating qualitative and quantitative methodology as well as incorporating big data analysis while trying to better understand cultural production in the contemporary art world. In her PhD research, she is focusing on better understanding the ways underlying network structure, positions, and core-periphery power-relations influence the ways of incorporation of CEE artists into core art collections and global art canon. She is interested in topics related to post-WWII and contemporary art practices as well as in questions related to the sociology of art and culture. Before starting her PhD she worked as a member of the research group of Kassák Museum and published reviews and art theoretical essays in several art journals.