The cognitive and sociopolitical categorization of contemporary art through the becoming of Diva

The emergence and dissolution of market categories are explained through segregated processes of cognitive, social and political categorization. We argue that market categories are in constant categorization processes that occur simultaneously day by day, following the ontological philosophy of becoming. With interdisciplinary research and inspired by multi-sited ethnography, we used more than 21 hours of recorded material, media articles, Facebook comments and visual representations to study the dynamics of the contemporary art market category through the becoming of Diva, land art in Pernambuco, Brazil. We highlight five theoretical contributions: (i) the difference between the speed of change at the core and periphery of a category; (ii) the speed of change as the intensity of interactional processes; (iii) cognitive categorization as apparent stability; (iv) the similarity between the socio-material structure of members and their respective category; (v) dynamics of a category as a result of cognitive and sociopolitical categorization.