The Tastemaker Network

The contemporary art market is shaped by a complex web of relationships between institutions, galleries, curators, collectors, and critics. The Network Evolution visualization maps this ecosystem as a 3,523-node tastemaker network — revealing who holds influence and how that influence shifts over time.

Each node in the network represents a key art-world participant: a museum, gallery, auction house, curator, collector, or critic. The node's position reflects its structural importance — actors with higher influence (measured by indegree centrality) sit closer to the network's center, while peripheral participants occupy the outer rings.

Four Influence Tiers

Network participants are classified into four tiers based on their rank in the indegree centrality distribution:

• Tier 1 (75–100th Rank) — The innermost circle of art-world influence. Top museums, flagship galleries, and the most-referenced curators and critics.
• Tier 2 (50–75th Rank) — Established players with meaningful centrality: mid-tier institutions, prominent galleries, and recognised tastemakers.
• Tier 3 (25–50th Rank) — Peripheral but present: emerging spaces, niche critics, and developing influencers beginning to register in the network.
• Tier 4 (0–25th Rank) — The outermost band. Accounts with minimal network centrality, often recent entrants or highly specialised actors.

Inward & Outward Movement

By comparing the network at two points in time — 2022 and 2025 — we can observe how tastemaker nodes migrate through the influence hierarchy:

• Moved inward — Nodes that gained centrality, moving toward Tier 1. These are rising influencers whose opinions carry increasing weight.
• Moved outward — Nodes that lost centrality, drifting toward Tier 4. These actors wield less structural influence than before.
• Stable — Nodes whose tier position remained consistent across both periods.
• New — Nodes appearing only in 2025, representing new entrants to the tastemaker ecosystem.

AMIS & Indegree Centrality

The position of each node is determined by its Art-Market Importance Score (AMIS), a proprietary centrality metric derived from the network's link structure. AMIS is based on indegree centrality — the number and quality of incoming connections a node receives from other tastemakers.

A museum director who is referenced, tagged, or engaged with by many other high-importance actors will have a high AMIS and sit near the center. A peripheral collector mentioned by few actors will sit in Tier 4. This weighted approach ensures that not all connections are equal — being noticed by a Tier-1 institution matters more than a casual interaction.

Reading the Visualization

The 3D visualization presents two rotating spherical networks side by side: