• Korean Association of Arts Management
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• no.56
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• pp.189-215
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• 2020

This study aims to understand the process of valuing contemporary artworks by young and emerging artists via online art platforms. This paper conceptualizes Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital, which theoretically guides us for conducting a case study of Saatchi Art. This article mainly collected data by interviewing seven Korean artists who were selected by our case with the supplement information carried out direct observation and document reviews. By analyzing the gathered data, the key finding of this research is that the selection of artists in Saatchi Art's curatorial program implicitly admits and guarantees the value of their artworks. By doing so, it contributes to building symbolic capital for the selected artists. This article also contends that such construction of the artists' symbolic capital results from the accumulated symbolic capitals of the founder and curator of the online platform. The theoretical contribution of this paper is to expand previous research on valuing artworks in the offline art world into the online one.