My research lies at the intersection of art history, cultural history, and the sociology of art.
It primarily focuses on the history of contemporary art institutions and the public policies implemented in this field. My perspective is resolutely international, with a focus on France, the United States, and Germany—three countries at the heart of the international contemporary art system, yet markedly different in the organization of their respective art scenes and in the administration of cultural affairs.
I have traced the history of numerous museums, art centers, biennials, and alternative spaces, and have worked on the history of contemporary art exhibitions and collections since 1945, combining archival sources, interviews, and quantitative methods. I have also analyzed the profound transformations in the relationships between states and the visual arts since the 1960s, within the broader context of the rise of cultural policies.
Alongside the study of public contemporary art institutions, I am now conducting research on the art market. I am particularly interested in the history of gallery exhibitions—an underexplored field of research that sheds light on the long-term evolution of the artistic directions promoted by the key tastemakers of the art market, as well as the changing tastes of contemporary art collectors.
These various research projects are guided by a common goal: to analyze the conditions of emergence of the field of contemporary art in the second half of the 20th century. My central hypothesis is that the end of the avant-gardes, the entry into a ‘postmodern’ era, and the advent of a new artistic period—commonly referred to for over half a century as ‘contemporary art’—are less the result of technical or stylistic ruptures than of a profound transformation in the social and institutional structures of the art world.
It is from this perspective that I also conduct research in the history of ideas, in order to reconstruct the genealogy of a number of key concepts that structure the historiography of modern and contemporary art—beginning with the notion of the avant-garde, which has undergone multiple transformations since its emergence in revolutionary France, and the extensive debates surrounding the idea of postmodernity (or postmodernism), which accompanied the development of contemporary art from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Finally, I explore what these transformations of artistic institutions reveal about the redefinition of the norms of legitimate culture and the tastes of the ‘cultivated classes,’ notably through the study of intermediaries and tastemakers in the art world (curators, gallerists, collectors) from the postwar period to the present day.