My current research is primarily concerned with issues of value in the world of the visual arts and will result in a book length manuscript on the art world. It grows out of a long-standing interest in the fraught relationship between culture and money, a question on which I have written extensively over the last ten years. I start from the assumption that the art world is a place dominated by a shared struggle about the value, ownership and meaning of art, a conflict that is also about who decides who is to have it, and what it is worth. It is haunted by a series of questions: "what makes a work of art great?", "what makes it valuable?", "is it genuine, or is it a fake?", "to whom does a great work of art belong - an individual proprietor, a culture, the nation, or humanity?" Artists, scholars and curators, patrons, collectors, dealers, and even on occasion the public itself offer very different answers to these questions, responding in ways that often make clear that they think they are better qualified to answer them than their rivals. My current project examines these questions and debates, and those who have participated in them over the course of more than five centuries.
To make such a project manageable, I have divided it into four parts, each of which deals with one major feature of the art world. The first explores the often fraught relationship between those who made art and those who commissioned and collected it. The second examines the Jekyll and Hyde relationship between art experts and art forgers. The third focuses on the morally ambiguous figure of the art dealer and his or her part in shaping major changes in the art market, while the final section addresses the vexed question of artistic heritage and the proprietorship of culture. Each section begins with a modern case study taken from the twentieth century, moves into a wide-ranging historical survey of the issues, and then returns to raise questions about how to think analytically about the historical material.
This project uses archives in Europe and at the Getty, and connects with my on-going collaboration with the Getty-USC program in the study of the history of collecting.
Last updated: March 20, 2009 13:59
