Prize & price: The Turner Prize as a valuation device in the contemporary art market

High prices garnered by British contemporary artists are often presented as a problem of valuation. This article seeks to connect the rapid ascent of British contemporary artists to the emergence and institutionalization of the Turner Prize, today's most prestigious art award. Although prizes and awards proliferate in fields of cultural production, little academic research has investigated their implications for artists' careers and trajectories. Combining a detailed, qualitative description of the institutionalization of the Turner Prize with a quantitative investigation of its influence on auction prices, we find that British contemporary artists' unusual valuation pattern (fast market ascension and hastened, rather than "deferred," commercial success) largely results from a different relation between value and price rooted in the Turner Prize's three innovative valuation mechanisms: brokerage, deliberation, and institutional labeling.