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

•Examines young British contemporary artists’ unusual market trajectories.•Provides qualitative description of Turner Prize and quantitative testing of its impact.•Identifies 3 mechanisms that make the TP more or less consequential over time.•TP departs from institutionalized routines by enabling hastened success of artists.•Valuation of young British artists not a “bubble” but results from impact of TP.

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.