The art market in Chile between 1903 and 1926: exploratory methodology from the Digital Humanities

Abstract

This article proposes an exploratory methodology to analyze the Chilean art market at the beginning of the 20th century. Based on a selection of auction reports and private sales of national painters from the Eyzaguirre Auction House, and complementary sources (press, photographs), it asks about the actors and the economic and socio-cultural dynamics that structured this field. On the one hand, it shows the exhibition/sale duo as a new practice of the period, which was installed as a commercial hallmark of the Eyzaguirre family, while responding to a common strategy between the auction house and the artists, which we crystallize in the conceptual proposal of «success». On the other hand, it raises the tools of Digital Humanities as fundamental to think and visualize art markets, as they allow processing large data samples and generate visualization modes, illustrating this point with the use of the network analysis software Gephi.