We’re delighted to announce that tickets are now open to non-members for the ICRA Conference, to be held in London on January 8th 2026.
Our opening keynote lecture will be by Griselda Pollock, Professor emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art, University of Leeds. It is titled “Oh, how I love a catalogue raisonné – and how much it reveals about the way we define art.”
Because she had never imagined creating a catalogue raisonné until recently, Professor Pollock – like all art historians – has long relied on and valued those who produced these essential tools. She loved finding unexpected insights in seemingly dull listings, yet now asks: what does cataloguing do to our understanding of art? As a feminist art historian, she’s long despaired that so many women artists lack catalogues, even as she depended on those created by committed dealers and curators. Today, especially for living artists, catalogues often serve market and investment needs – just as the genre first emerged in the 19th-century dealer-critic system. As a post-Foucaultian scholar of the archive, she’s intrigued by what happens to an artist’s work and memory without a catalogue, and by the constructed image of an oeuvre that conventional cataloguing creates. She asks how an artist’s work should shape the catalogue it requires: don’t categories like chronology and medium formalize all art? What would a rogue, feminist, postcolonial catalogue look like? And can the catalogue raisonné itself be reread as a necessary but undertheorized symptom of an art history struggling to survive contemporary financialization? What, she asks, is the theory and sociology of the catalogue raisonné?
Do please join us!
See links for ticketing and conference info. Why not join ICRA – receive early access, discounts on tickets, and more – as well as membership of a community of scholars, artists’ estates, publishers, legal advisers and many more engaged in the field of catalogues raisonnés.
Source: https://icra.art
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