Jointly organised by Sotheby’s Institute of Art and the Colnaghi Foundation, this international conference seeks to explore the aesthetic, intellectual, and financial links between commercial and institutional curatorial practices, their synergies and the ways in which they inflect(ed) each other, and their impact on value systems and market fortunes.
Keen to engage with calls to diversify current scholarship, the conference will be adopting a broad historical and geographical perspective, and papers considering under-studied regions of the art market and the Global South are particularly encouraged. Positioned at the nexus of academic scholarship and professional practices, its interdisciplinary approach hopes to provide a fertile discussion ground for academics, art market professional, curators and collectors to reflect on curatorial networks of exchange and interlocking dialogues, both past and present, between public institutions and the art trade.
Methodological approaches including oral histories and digital humanities are welcome. Proposals offering critical perspectives may consider (but are not limited to) the following themes:
– Curatorial strategies employed in the art trade, past and present
– Impact of curatorial choices on market values
– Art dealers working as curators in institutional settings and for private collectors
– Art dealers mediating the acquisition and display of private collections in public institutional settings
– The curation of diasporic art collections
– The curation and presentation of the history of the art market in public institutions
– The curation of art fairs
– Art dealers curating non-selling exhibitions
– Museum curators as institutional collectors, expert advisers, validators and, occasionally, art-market agents
– Inclusion of privately / commercially owned pieces in museum exhibitions
– Value systems underpinning commercial curatorial practices
– Commercial curation as a speculative financial practice
– Artists as curators and market-makers of their own work
– The commercial curation of cross-collections
Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words for a 25-minute paper, along with a brief biography to Barbara Lasic b.lasic@sia.edu by 31 October 2024. Successful papers will be notified by 15 November.
You must be logged in to post a comment.