Indian Market: A Tournament of Values

Abstract

Following Bourdieu, the process of commoditization has been understood to be the most socially significant process that art undergoes. That understanding presupposes the power of economic value, the order of value that all other values must resist or be overtaken by. This article analyzes the Santa Fe Indian Market as a tournament of values, where various orders of value compete for legitimacy and authority. While opposed aesthetic and economic orders frame evaluations at Indian Market, they serve primarily as background. At Indian Market, evaluations that use an administrative order of value are the site of intense contest and have great social significance both to this art world and to broader social, political, and economic concerns. A social theory of art relevant to many different art forms and traditions must take into account multiple orders of value and provide a method for analyzing their potential significance to participants.

For Rick Parmentier.

During a highly contentious meeting of the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA), the organization that sponsors Indian Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a spokesman for the governor of Santo Domingo Pueblo rallied the crowd, saying: “I support Indian Market because it is our culture. Indian Market is not a White Man. … Some of you want to be classy, get ahead of others. But, we won’t follow you.” The meeting was crowded with representatives from Santo Domingo who had been incited by changes to the guidelines that determine which works are allowed at Indian Market. Recently, the region had seen an influx of jewelry in the “Southwestern style” (a legal term for Navajo- and Pueblo-style jewelry made by non-Native producers). In response, SWAIA commissioned a panel of artists, dealers, and other experts to develop revised guidelines that would exclude jewelry containing elements associated with China-made, inauthentic jewelry: machine-tooled components and falsely marked materials such as dyed “turquoise.” Those new guidelines were considered to unfairly target the major jewelry-producing Pueblo of Santo Domingo, prompting the face-off.

This all took place during a period of important changes at SWAIA. Historically, SWAIA has been administered by Anglos dedicated to Indian “betterment.” Originally called the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs, the organization was founded in 1922 to mobilize opposition to the Bursam Bill, legislation that would have transferred land and water rights from the Pueblos to settlers. The association continued to serve as a civil society intermediary to the Pueblos throughout its early history, providing advocacy, legal, medical, and technical services. During the Depression, it revived the Indian Arts and Crafts Exhibition, a then-defunct program of the Museum of New Mexico/School of American Research (MNM/SAR), as an economic development tool to aid impoverished Pueblos. The exhibition grew into Indian Market, becoming SWAIA’s signature program (Bernstein 2012). But from 1994 to 1998, governance of SWAIA changed significantly. The organization had its first Indian director, a religious official from San Ildefonso Pueblo and former employee of the Institute for American Indian Arts Museum. The staff was majority Indian and the board had more Indian members than ever before in its history. Over that period, SWAIA concentrated on definitively shifting Indian Market’s mission toward building an international showcase for Indian art.

This article discusses how artworks come to Indian Market, focusing on Pueblo pottery.¹ Pueblo pottery is art, and it represents Pueblo culture in highly articulated and deeply legitimated ways. At Indian Market, Pueblo pottery leaves its Pueblo makers, is subject to extensive evaluation by non-Pueblo people, and is sold to them. In other words, it enters a commodity situation. Rather than being a certain kind of thing, commodities are “things in a certain situation” (Appadurai 1986, 13): the situation of being alienated, measured, and quantified. The process of commoditization places things in those situations and, further, entails a constellation of multiple, intertwined associations: of compelling forms and actions into exchange, of alienating them from their relations of production, of assigning them economic value they did not have before, of asserting that all of their value can be expressed as economic value, of denying their singularity (Kopytoff 1986). By way of those associations, commoditization also connects to power; it is wielded by the powerful, and it contributes to their power economically, socially, and culturally. If Indian Market is a site for the commoditization of Pueblo pottery, it’s hard to see how it could be understood as anything but “a White Man,” that is, as anything but a place defined and controlled by the powerful, where they display and deploy and reproduce their power.

“Art Worlds,” writes Gary Allen Fine, “are status and power games with the object as a strategic piece” (2003, 158). For Bourdieu (1993), commoditization has a special role in these games because in this relatively “autonomous” social field, people’s struggles for power and domination are framed by special sets of rules, most importantly, the rule stipulating that the value of art remain distinct from commoditized value. That distinction sets the spoils of the game: in fields of art people vie to establish their own (socially potent) disinterest and autonomy, while demonstrating others’ relative lack of those traits. The best way to establish disinterest and autonomy is through the possession of autonomous (i.e., uncommoditized) art. Beyond possession, agents employ a host of other strategies to exhibit their distinction: production, appropriation, editing, classification and reclassification, consumption, critique, rejection, nonrecognition (Bourdieu 1984, 282). Because art is defined in opposition to commodities—it has a named creator, is singular, and is protected from exchange and valuable beyond quantification—the commoditization of another’s art is a particularly potent way of demonstrating status and power.

According to Bourdieu, such contests are especially heated between those who hold economic capital and artists and intellectuals, those vested primarily in cultural capital. Although they struggle against one another, these actors are locked in mutual interdependence. Those with economic capital depend on artists and intellectuals to define and defend the autonomy of fields of art (underwriting the other-than-commoditized value of art and thus protecting art’s ability to signify the disinterested taste and autonomy of its possessor or consumer or patron). At the same time, those with cultural capital depend on the moneyed and powerful to externally certify the legitimacy of their (relatively) autonomous, internal evaluations through prizes and awards and various institutionalized forms of canonization (Allen and Parsons 2006; English 2009; Heinich 2009).

On such a field, what could the spokesman from Santo Domingo have meant by asserting that Indian Market is not a White Man? He was, of course, directing his criticism to the (new) Indian directors and board of SWAIA, saying: “Don’t act like a White Man.”² In what sense did SWAIA act like a White Man? Could SWAIA act like an Indian instead? How? Such questions have relevance to the particular ways in which Indian people evaluate White behavior and values, and how they use negative “portraits of ‘The Whiteman’” to model appropriate and contrasting Indian identities (Basso 1979). But they also have broader relevance to diverse situations where artworks and other items of cultural significance—what Annette Weiner (1992, 1994) calls “symbolically dense” objects or “possessions”—that are made by indigenous, ethnic, and postcolonial people enter into contexts dominated by Western markets and institutions. To what extent and in what ways can values held by nondominant people compete in such contexts?

I argue that to answer this question, the significance of commoditization must be recognized as generated and negotiated within participant practice. To understand its significance, it is necessary to place commoditization in those specific contexts, contexts that may include multiple ways of defining, manipulating, and assessing value. These other “regimes” (Myers 2002a, 2002b, 2004, 2013) or “orders” of value are weighed and compared when participants actively engage in “evaluations” (Lamont 2012) to determine “worth” (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006). Moreover, such orders of value compete at events like Indian Market in tournaments of value (Appadurai 1986, 21) or, perhaps more accurately, in tournaments of values, where various orders of value are assessed and legitimated (Moeran 2013, 201). Five orders of value compete for legitimacy at Indian Market. To understand how value is constituted at Indian Market and how, in this particular context, value is conceived as reflecting and amplifying social power, those orders of value and their associations must be carefully unpacked.

Pueblo Pottery

Whether in 1880 or 1980 and whether at Zuni or Acoma, Hopi or San Juan, a traditionally dressed Pueblo woman shaping or carrying a water jar or olla is the representation of the Pueblo. (Babcock 1994, 41)

Pueblo pots are potent representations of Pueblo culture. The round, enclosed forms of ceramic pots are likened to a womb, to the architecture of Pueblo homes and villages, and to the shape of the universe (Swentzell 1990).³

The notion of container is crucial to the worldview of the Pueblo. The lower half of our cosmos is a pot which contains life. It is the womb of the mother. … In Santa Clara Pueblo the making of pots embodies a cultural continuity that not only links us to our ancestors but calls forth the presence of our old Tewa cosmology. Nung-ochu-quijo, meaning Unripe-Earth-Old-Lady, is used by those who know to express the belief that earth, the nurturing being, joins the human being and together they give the pot form and life. (Naranjo 1994, 47)

In Pueblo emergence myths, the human, middle, or surface plane develops from being “Unripe”—empty, soft, shrouded in mists, unready for human habitation—to “Ripe”—firm, full of humans, animals, and plants, all matter organized appropriately. Through emergence, things “become,” gaining matter to embody their essence. Becoming is tied to specific places, holes in the earth where forms emerged and where people retreat to worship. A child is born “Unripe” and must be “made” through a series of initiations, from the naming ritual through the rites of passage. Becoming an adult Tewa person involves being embodied in different forms of “Made-ness”: “Dry Food People” (ordinary citizens), Towa é (political or religious office holders) and “Made People” (political and religious leaders) (Ortiz 1969).

The production of Pueblo pottery resonates with these ideas about emergence, becoming, and made-ness. Reinforcing the association between reproduction and the making of pots is the central role kinship plays in the distribution of rights to use particular sites, materials, techniques, forms, styles, and designs: digging clay from areas claimed by particular kin groups, thanking Clay Mother where clay is found, sifting dried clays and returning the detritus to kinship sites, using feet to knead wet clay on the ground, tasting the clay, making slips according to traditional recipes, polishing slipwares with inherited stones, building dung fires in kinship groups.

Museum exhibitions of Pueblo pots often invoke emergence, becoming, and made-ness as well. For example, visitors to Here, Now and Always, the permanent exhibition at Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, enter the exhibit along a narrow, rounded, inclining walk, surrounded by river stones, the sounds of running water, and darkness infused by bright, natural-looking light at the end. The entrance recalls emergence as it is represented when climbing a ladder through the central hole at the top of an underground kiva. Visitors are led out of the Here, Now and Always exhibition into the adjoining Buschbaum Gallery of Southwest Pottery, which uses prehistoric, historic, and contemporary pots to illustrate the individual styles of pottery associated with each of the sixteen inhabited Pueblos. Collectors are encouraged to use the exhibit to learn the distinctive traits of each Pueblo’s pottery style and to buy examples from each place.

The market for Pueblo pottery was founded in the 1880s during Anglo expansion into the US Southwest, first by traders and later as part of tourism packages created by the Fred Harvey Company for the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway (Batkin 1999). The exhibition of Pueblo pottery was initiated in the region by anthropologist Edgar Lee Hewett, who served as director of the MNM/SAR from its founding in 1907 until 1946. Hewett had been director of anthropological exhibits at the 1914 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego and at the 1916 San Francisco World’s Fair.⁴ In San Diego, he produced “The Painted Desert,” a five-acre reproduction of a Pueblo that included live demonstrations of pottery making, dancing, weaving, and bread baking. Back in Santa Fe, Hewett revised an existing event to create the Santa Fe Fiesta, a “Grand Spectacular Commemorative Historical Pageant,” that reenacts the defeat and reclaiming of Santa Fe by Spanish Conquistadores after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (Wilson 1997). From 1922 through 1931, the fiesta included an Indian Arts and Crafts Exhibition. Navaho blankets, Pueblo pottery, baskets, and dances were exhibited and Navaho sandpainting, silversmithing, weaving, and beadwork and Pueblo pottery making were demonstrated under the portal of the Palace of the Governors on the Santa Fe Plaza. Anglo painters from the Taos art colony, who took Indians and the local landscape as their subject matter, also participated. Hewett, Kenneth Chapman, and Wesley Bradfield, all of the MNM/SAR, acted as judges.

Throughout the 1920s, Anglo anthropologists, artists, and patrons collaborated with Indian artists—Pueblo potters in particular—to reshape the tourist market, establishing Pueblo pottery as an art form. Working through the SAR, the MNM, and the Indian Arts Fund, they elaborated Pueblo pottery’s aesthetics, art history, and cultural context; standardized particular styles; identified and sponsored gifted potters; and established legitimating procedures and venues for exhibition (Wade 1985; Mullin 2001). Today, Pueblo pottery is exhibited in art museums as well as ethnological museums and is included in some of the world’s great art collections.

Coming into Indian Market: Entry Receiving

Approximately 1,600 artists sell or present pottery, jewelry, kachina dolls, baskets, beadwork, leatherwork, clothing, sculpture, and painting at Indian Market, which also includes a range of other arts programs such as concerts, a fashion show, and a film festival. Beginning on the third Thursday of each August, Indian Market overwhelms much of public and private life in Santa Fe. Cultural institutions all over the city sponsor related exhibitions and programs. Major collectors and representatives of important museums and dealers come to purchase works. All of the city’s central streets are blocked off after Wednesday to accommodate the construction of the market’s 600 booths. Approximately 100,000 people attend. Hotel occupancy reaches 100 percent, and Santa Feans often have a house full of relatives or friends for the week.

On the Thursday before Indian Market opens to the public, artists gather at the Sweeney Convention Center in downtown Santa Fe to submit entries that will compete for award ribbons and prizes. Every one of approximately 275 categories outlined in SWAIA Guidelines has a first-, second-, and third-place ribbon and a monetary prize associated with it. For each entry, an artist is provided a triplicate form requesting name, tribal affiliation, booth number at Indian Market, entry title or description, production techniques, wholesale price, and the classification, division, and category in which they wish to compete. Having completed an entry form, each artist waits in a long line for a seat at the entry receiving table.

Winning a ribbon at Indian Market is an honor and an imprimatur of quality, carries a cash prize, and enables an artist to double or triple the price of the prizewinning piece and to increase the prices of other work brought to market. So, artists have been known to attempt various strategies to maximize the number of ribbons they might win. Since each artist is allowed only three entries per year, they would prefer that their works be accepted into three different categories so they aren’t competing against their own work. Artists would rather not compete with a family member in the same category either. Also, artists prefer to enter works in “Traditional” categories because traditional works generally are more highly valued, command higher prices, and because “Non-traditional” divisions do not explicitly distinguish Pueblo styles from one another (and so present fewer opportunities to win a ribbon).

To illustrate: A jar, if entered as “Traditional,” might fall into Division F: “Traditional pottery, painted designs on matte or semi-matte surface—jars only” and then be further ordered into one of the following categories:

1. 1301. Jars—Hopi

2. 1302. Jars—Acoma or Laguna

3. 1303. Jars—Zia, Santa Ana, Santo Domingo or Cochiti

4. 1304. Jars—Zuni

5. 1305. Jars—Other Pueblos or Tribes

However, if this jar is in the style of, say, Acoma jars but: (1) contains “commercial material—stoneware or slabware, commercial paint for decoration, added material, stones”; and/or (2) has been “kiln fired”; and/or (3) has been “painted after firing,” it should be entered as “Non-Traditional” and would fall into Division J: “Non-traditional, any forms using non-traditional materials or techniques, Category 1602: Jars and Vases, painted (other than stoneware).” In that category, it would compete with other jars produced using some nontraditional technique in many Pueblo styles: Hopi, Laguna, Zia, Santa Ana, Santo Domingo, Cochiti, Zuni, Jemez, Santa Clara, and San Ildefonso (SWAIA 1997).

On the opposite side of the entry-receiving tables are approximately 200 volunteer entry receivers and assistants, predominantly Anglo. Typically, entry receivers are native Santa Feans with years of experience at Indian Market, are connected to the arts as collectors or docents or board members of nonprofits, and are longtime SWAIA members and volunteers. Behind them, the Convention Center is filled with tables divided into classifications, divisions, and categories. By 6:00 p.m. thousands of entries must be ordered appropriately in preparation for judging on Friday morning. Artists and entry receivers often know one another and, when an artist takes a seat to submit an entry, may visit a little, but familiarity is discouraged as it might lead to a perception of favoritism. Instead, receivers tend to focus on the artwork being entered and the documents they have before them—the artist’s entry form and the SWAIA Guidelines, a document outlining the classifications, divisions, and categories to be used in that year’s judging.

First, the entry receiver must check that the person submitting the entry is authorized to do so. All artists who officially participate in Indian Market are tribal members, are accepted into market by a jury that reviews their past work and, until 2012, were sanctioned to sell only specific categories of work. This part of the entry process can be complicated because in many families multiple producers contribute to the completion of individual works or to the production of materials such as clays, slips, and fires. Also, one member of a family may be submitting work for several others: a mother may submit her own work, her daughter’s work, and that of her mother. So, one individual might enter nine works under the names of three different artists in the same family. (This is often the case when an elder is teaching a younger family member.) All work must be “affixed with a signature or trademark,” and a receiver must confirm that this mark corresponds to the entry paperwork.

Receivers also must check that each entry form is complete. They often must explicitly request that the method of dying wool, producing pigments, firing a pot, or shaping stones be reported. These can be particularly touchy questions because, while machine-dyed wools, prefabricated paints, electric kilns, and machine-tooled stones enable artists to save money, achieve complexity and scale in their work, and successfully execute more pieces, these materials and techniques are considered “non-traditional” and, by some, inauthentic. Receivers may recommend that an artist add further detail to an entry’s description, suggesting, for example, that designs on a piece be named or elaborated. Entries are carefully inspected. Receivers reject broken or damaged works.

Finally, entry receivers must authorize an entry’s classification by cosigning the entry form with the artist. In training sessions, written guidelines, and informal mentoring, receivers are instructed not to impose their authority in any of these interactions with an artist. Instead, I observed that the most experienced receivers use their expert knowledge of the guidelines and the ways in which the guidelines are applied to calm conflict with artists. For example, I observed a receiver defuse an interaction that was growing increasingly tense by engaging in a detailed examination of the guidelines with the artist. Both the artist and the receiver shared in the difficult work of deciphering the document. Shifting the guidelines so that both she and the artist could refer to them across the table, the receiver pointed and didactically referred back and forth between the entry and various divisions and categories and their descriptions, asking for explicit acknowledgment of each embedded ordering of the piece. (The artist appeared no happier with the result but seemed to have been rendered mute in the face of this ordering.) Another approach is to become an accomplice in an artist’s strategies for garnering a ribbon. For example, one artist wanted to enter a pot in a Traditional Division, but the pot appeared to the receiver to have been kiln fired rather than dung fired. The receiver suggested that the artist would, of course, be allowed to enter this pot as traditional, but that the judges would certainly give the pot a low ranking. Once a classification has been agreed upon, the receiver gives one copy of the signed entry form to an assistant who will take it, along with the entry, to the appropriate table and section prepared for judging.

Entry receiving is a complex administrative task. It demands encyclopedic knowledge of a detailed system of classifications and their appropriate application to individual cases. Classifications are made by entry receivers using administrative authority grounded in this expert knowledge of SWAIA’s Guidelines and of a scale of saliency for the interrelations and distinctions among categories. Receivers must know which classificatory decisions matter most and which distinctions matter most in the classification of a particular piece. Should a seed bowl that has a mouth with a diameter larger than one third of its total diameter be categorized as a nonstandard seed bowl or as a jar? Should a stylistically traditional pot that was kiln fired be categorized as traditional or nontraditional? Entry receivers apply and display this expertise to overcome points of contention and successfully negotiate interactions with artists.

The administrative authority held by entry receivers is powerful, but limited. I was told that, in the past, once entry forms had been cosigned by an artist and an entry receiver, an entry could only be reclassified as a part of the judging process. However, in response to what was seen to be pervasive miscategorizations on the part of receivers, a new group called “Officials” (led by the head judge) was instituted and empowered to reclassify works during entry receiving. If an entry receiver was unsure, if the guidelines were unclear, or if a conflict was growing, an assistant would be sent to bring one of these officials to the receiving table for negotiations. In general, when an object is considered to have been categorized incorrectly, entry receivers are blamed, undermining their claims to authority both individually and as a group.⁵

Judging

On Friday, entries are judged. Judging teams are led by two judges, typically master artists, dealers, curators, or scholars. During my fieldwork, there were Indian and Anglo judges in something like equal measure. Judging teams also include a recorder and two assistants, who were predominantly Anglos. Recorders and assistants are responsible for accurately documenting judges’ decisions, marking and distributing ribbons, and checking and compiling award information so that it can be released to the local media quickly and correctly. Recorders and assistants are not to express any opinion on entries but are told to refer to definitions given in SWAIA Guidelines, if asked; the lead trainer reminded recorders and assistants “that [they] are the serfs of the Judging team.”

After morning training sessions and updates on any revisions to the SWAIA Guidelines, judging begins around noon. Judges examine all of the entries in a category, picking up pieces to feel their weight, holding pots at eye level to gauge their shape, moving pieces next to one another for comparison, debating the techniques used or an artist’s claims on the entry form, remarking on an artist’s development by comparing current entries to those of previous years or to those of a family member or mentor. Judges are deciding which elements—form, technique, content, style, tradition, innovation, progression—are most important artistically and creating hierarchical arrangements within categories accordingly. Judges employ all sorts of individual criteria to make those decisions about artistic quality. One judge, a master polisher and carver of ceramics, took painstaking account of polishing and carving technique; her expertise appeared to me to simply overwhelm any other input. Another, the curator of an historical collection, took careful account of the traditional style of works when awarding ribbons, giving less attention to the use of nontraditional techniques.

While judges take significant time to demonstrate their ability to recognize the use of nontraditional techniques and materials, they are making primarily artistic decisions, and their decisions are not confined by such classificatory schema. Judges’ decisions are underwritten by artistic rather than administrative authority. For example, receivers and judges consistently claimed that employing nontraditional techniques will entail low ranking of an entry in a Traditional category. But I observed that when an entry exhibited formally innovative yet stylistically traditional elements—particularly large-scale or especially fine painted design—judges weighed those factors more heavily than the fact that, for example, a pot appeared to have been kiln fired. The judge justified this by stating, “You just wouldn’t put a big pot like that in a fire.” In other words, a large pot is simply too much work and too valuable to take the chance of damaging it in a (traditional) dung fire, and an artist made a reasonable and experienced artistic decision choosing to fire it in a kiln.

The authority to hierarchically arrange entries is grounded in a judge’s ability to selectively present and creatively manipulate knowledge about key artistic characteristics of works so as to foster consensus, to persuade the team and all comers that a given work is, artistically, the best representative of a class. When a debate broke out in the Non-Traditional set of divisions over whether a particular color of slip on a kiln-fired pot could be produced using natural pigments, as the artist claimed, a judge working in a Traditional Division and a potter working as a classification manager were called over to weigh in on the plausibility of this claim. Although each judge uses individual criteria to make an evaluation, I observed that judging teams spend a great deal of energy communicating justifications for those decisions to the whole team (including recorders and assistants) and working to reach consensus on award decisions.

Judges’ artistic authority also can be contested. In 1997, SWAIA’s Council of Artists—a body separate from SWAIA administration that represents artists’ concerns to the board—lobbied to introduce the right for artists to bar reclassification of entries during judging by checking a box on the entry form. These changes affront judges’ authority to definitively assess the content of and relations between categories by disallowing their total freedom to reclassify entries. During the same period, the Council of Artists also introduced the Indian Market Artists’ Choice Award, awarded entirely outside the judging process by the Chair of the Council of Artists. Displayed alongside the Best of Show winner, the Artists’ Choice winner undermined judges’ authority to assert the definitive Best of Show.

Buying and Selling Prizewinning Work

On Friday evening, the public finally can view all of the entries and prizewinners when SWAIA hosts a 5:30 p.m. “Sneak Preview” for high donors and a 7:00 p.m. “Preview” for all members. A list of prizewinners is released to the publication holding exclusive rights to produce the Indian Market Guide, which lists all of the artists registered for booths at Indian Market, along with booth numbers and a map locating booths on the plaza and adjoining streets. Members wait in a long line, enter, pick up a drink and some hors d’oeuvres, and take a copy of the guide from tall stacks by the entrance. Entries and ribbons are prominently displayed on cordoned-off tables throughout the Convention Center. By 7:15 p.m. the tables are surrounded by mobs of people three and four deep trying to view entries, and a new group of volunteers serves as runners who can retrieve an artist’s name and booth number from entry forms displayed alongside entries and their ribbons. Then visitors can begin to locate prizewinning pieces among the entries displayed on the cordoned-off tables and map out a plan for the booths they will visit the following day.

Sales at Indian Market involve high stakes. Prizewinning work is in short supply and only available once a year. Work by prizewinning artists, even work that has not itself won an award, also can be difficult to purchase. Some artists only make themselves available to collectors at this time of year. Because there are curators, major collectors, and influential dealers concentrated at the market, artists have an opportunity to see their work added to an important museum or private collection. And there are significant amounts of money in play: the work of prizewinning artists regularly brings between $10,000 and $20,000, and I witnessed artists collect $80,000 to $100,000 (about $116,000 to $144,000 in 2014 dollars) just in public sales at Indian Market.

The SWAIA rules state: “No items entered for judging may be bought by anyone before the Market opens Saturday morning nor may anyone make arrangements to buy anything while inside Sweeney Center [during Entry Receiving, Judging or Preview].” So, buyers have been known to attempt various strategies for maximizing their chances to purchase prizewinning work or work by a prizewinning artist. Dealers, collectors, or curators might contact an artist at some point during Friday night, arranging to purchase a prizewinning piece. The buyer might simply phone the artist, making this contact on the basis of an already-established relationship. A contact might be made during one of the many private parties and openings held for artists and Indian Market regulars by cultural institutions, publications, galleries, and residents late into Friday night. Although artists expressed discomfort or anxiety about flouting the official rules in this way, I was told that such sales are routine. Commonly, the Best of Show and many, if not all, of the prizewinning pieces in the Pottery and Jewelry divisions already have been secured for purchase by 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. on Saturday. It is considered ideal for a buyer to allow the artist to keep that work in the booth through early Saturday morning, maintaining the appearance that it was sold during market proper.

Buyers also stake out places throughout Friday night and early Saturday morning in the booths of well-recognized artists whose work is highly valued and has consistently won awards in years past.⁶ Buyers claim their places by camping out in a booth overnight and signing up on a list, usually initiated by its first signer. “Booth sitters” demonstrate their insider status in a variety of ways over these early morning hours. They arrive well prepared with supplies for the night. They recognize and greet other sitters, offering coffee and asking for news of the year gone by. They talk about the artists who have won ribbons this year and who have won ribbons in the past, and about who has purchased that prizewinning work. They inquire about other booths: How long is the list? Who’s on it? They discuss lists and how a list is supposed to work. I heard the process described like this: whoever arrives at the booth first and stays there, initiating the list, secures first place; buyers lose their place if they are not in the booth when their turn comes up; buying may begin at sunrise (rather than at 7:00 a.m., as stated in SWAIA official rules); buyers should purchase only one piece during a turn; the artist may change any of these rules; and SWAIA should butt out and let artists and buyers control the process.

One reason for all this discussion is that enterprising buyers perennially innovate ways to secure first place in the line without having to stay in a booth all night, missing openings, parties, or simply a warm night’s sleep. Once a dealer paid a proxy to camp overnight and hold his place. Once a buyer initiated a list at midnight, posted it, and left the booth to return much later in the morning. As buyers congregate, they share these stories and negotiate the validity and fairness of those maneuvers. In some cases, the ploy is simply rejected. This can prompt a confrontation, sometimes violent. Usually, though, the initiator leverages his reputation to have the list and set of rules accepted. The missing-after-midnight buyer, for example, was a well-known dealer familiar to the congregated buyers, who accepted his authority to bend accepted convention.

Around 4:30 a.m., artists and their assistants start arriving at the plaza to unload and set up. The streets become increasingly crowded with pickups and minivans being unloaded into lanes of doubled-up, back-to-back ten-foot by five-foot booths. There may be thirty buyers waiting in some booths. Reporters and film crews crowd around. At 5:30 or 6:00 a.m., artists and their assistants begin to unload boxes and bags of work for sale, unwrapping individual pieces and placing them on display. It’s still quite dark, and the crowds press in to see. Many of these works will be sold over the next thirty minutes and some will go into private collections or museum storage, not to be seen publicly again. Market regulars, armed with flashlights, stroll the booths taking the opportunity to get a glimpse of an artist’s work over the past year and to see who is buying what.

Now begins a complex and tense mediation between artists and assistants on the one side and buyers and spectators on the other. Officially, sales should not begin for another hour, when Indian Market opens at 7:00 a.m. But when it appears that all the works for sale have been readied, buyers on the list begin discussing when it might be acceptable to begin. Though the artist and assistants are present for these conversations, artists do not engage in them. They focus narrowly on the tasks of unloading and unwrapping pieces, consistently unresponsive when queries are addressed to all those assembled, some turning their faces away from the crowd and others simply leaving the booth to be watched over by the assistants.

At some point during this prolonged period when everything is prepared but sales are officially prohibited, the artist or a spouse or assistant will have asked for the list. Around 6:00 or 6:30 a.m., the artist asks the assembled crowd whether the first signers are present. This commences the purchasing process. In the booth of a prizewinning potter, the first buyer came forward. The potter had eight pots to sell that morning. They had been carefully unpacked, unwrapped and set out on a blanket on the ground. There were twelve buyers on the list, and they pressed in closely, kneeling down to get a better look. Behind them stood a crowd of onlookers, craning their necks to get a glimpse. The artist kneeled on the opposite side of the blanket, flanked by three assistants. The buyer pointed to three pots. The artist picked up and briefly discussed each pot in turn. The buyer chose a pot. The artist then passed it to the assistant, who moved aside to wrap the piece for shipping and collect the $12,000 payment. Another buyer came forward and another, and, after twenty-three minutes, all eight available pots were sold for a total of more than $75,000 (around $108,000 in 2014 dollars). Negotiating price anywhere at Indian Market is considered vulgar and visitors are explicitly directed not to do it.

By 8:00 a.m. many highly desired artists will have sold most of their work. Buyers can initiate talks with an artist about commissioning a work (although they may have to wait for three years or more until the artist has time to produce it). Potential buyers might be given a business card and an invitation to call the artist’s studio to arrange a private visit. Some prizewinning pieces remain displayed in booths for a while, accompanied by a small “SOLD” sign and, occasionally, by the buyer’s business card. By noon most of these are gone. In fact, by noon on Saturday, a good number of artists will have sold out or will make that claim by abandoning their booths. Commonly, these booths will be turned over to a family member or friend to sell their own work.

For the rest of the weekend, Indian Market looks something like the Expositions that Hewett took as his inspiration more than one hundred years ago. It is crowded with tourists. Folks promenade their silver jewelry, concha belts, cowboy hats and boots, velvet skirts, ribbon shirts. Visitors purchase pots and jewelry, browse artwork on display, and picnic on Navajo tacos or lamb stew from the concession stands. Artists, Santa Feans, and Indian Market regulars attend talks, concerts, dances, films and the annual fashion show, and visit with family and friends.

Indian Market Is Not a White Man

At Indian Market, as in other art worlds, the economic and the aesthetic represent opposed orders of value. These orders of value are autonomous and, at the same time, mutually dependant. They frame the creation of value in this field. However, as we have seen, at Indian Market other orders of value come into play as well. An administrative order of value evaluates objects according to how well they embody classifications, especially classifications differentiating traditional from nontraditional works. An artistic order of value evaluates objects according to how well they balance tradition, innovation, form, material, style, and craft. An order of conspicuous value evaluates objects according to who consumes them (in-the-know consecrators as opposed to ignorant, if tasteful, tourists). This order of value is much like what Bourdieu calls the “middlebrow” or “bourgeois” (1993, 125), which appeals to popular taste but is also aspirational (Stewart 2010). As in any successful ritual complex, these orders of value resonate with and reflect one another as multiple, embedded processes of ordering unfold over the course of Indian Market.

Of course, the economic order of value evaluates objects according to price. What, however, constitutes the aesthetic, disinterested order of value in this context? The aesthetic order of value is uncertain here. Bourdieu writes: “The experience of the work of art as being immediately endowed with meaning and value is a result of the accord between the two mutually founded aspects of the same historical institution: the cultured habitus and the artistic field” (1993, 257). In this case, no such accord exists. Is the aesthetic order of value the “cultural” one that relates Indian art to key cultural principles such as emergence, becoming, and made-ness? Or is it the one that assesses the artistic quality of artworks? In this context, those orders of value are distinct from one another and their connection to one another is uncertain. (Indian artworks that go home to museum exhibitions like the one at MAIC do help to institutionally canonize that connection, however.)

The ethnic marking of these orders of value helps to keep them distinct from one another. The economic and conspicuous orders of value are highly marked White. Indians disdain having anything to with them. The cultural order of value is marked Indian, of course. The artistic order of value is shared, as we saw when Indian and White teams of judges make consensual, negotiated decisions about prizewinners. This is the kind of “contact zone” that James Clifford (1997) imagines museums might become. The administrative order of value is marked White but is highly contested from both Indian artists and from expert (unmarked) judges. The administrative order of value is the key site of struggle in this art world.

And it was in reference to this contested administrative order of value that SWAIA could be accused of acting like a White man. For the artists of Santo Domingo, the fact that they are Indians makes their work Indian art. When Indian artists are disallowed from exhibiting at Indian Market, this is the same as saying that they are not Indians. Doing so uses Indian Market to create hierarchies among Indians—“getting classy”—rather than using Indian Market as a time to come together as a cohesive Indian community, as a place where stratifications in income and influence may be leveled through cooperation and redistribution. Acting that way is a serious matter, and one that broadcasts to a very broad set of social, political, and economic concerns in Indian Country.

In the French context that Bourdieu studied, art is the ideal result and object of economic disinterest. For that reason, the struggles of those who hold cultural capital to show that their production and evaluations of art are fully autonomous from the economic order of value has special, indeed critical, social relevance. Art underwrites the value of their cultural capital, their stakes in the game. But art does not have that role in all contexts. Therefore, the social significance of the commoditization of art cannot be taken for granted. At Indian Market, the highest stakes are not in the commoditization of art. The highest stakes at Indian Market are in the administration of art. To recognize the social significance of administration demands an analytic stance that can accommodate the multiple ways in which participants evaluate art.