The inaugural conference of the UNESCO Chair at the École du Louvre aims to cast a retrospective gaze upon the conditions that gave rise to provenance research and upon the reasons why it has become an indispensable practice today — in the management of museum collections, in art-historical and archaeological research, and in international relations alike.
Far from being a recent invention or the product of a linear and steady expansion, the current imperative to establish the full biographical history of museum and library collections is, in fact, an ancient criterion of the historiography of arts and cultures. Its trajectory of use, and its place within the hierarchy of scientific methods of inquiry, has been marked by threshold moments in which art history intersected with the fields of politics, international relations, and law. External conditions — such as geopolitical shifts or developments in legislation and jurisprudence — have at times fostered its development; conversely, the strengthening of provenance research methodologies has given rise to conceptual innovations in adjacent fields of art history. Thus, from the 1970s onwards, notions such as professional ethics (the ICOM Code of Ethics), and more recently relational ethics (Sarr, Savoy, 2019) or the pluriversal (Diagne, Amselle, 2018) have been elaborated in order to reexamine intercultural relations from a decentred perspective.
For additional information, visit arthist.net <http://arthist.net/>, the source of this call: https://arthist.net/archive/51919
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