Tag: value of art

CFP: Embodying Value (RSA, Toronto, 17-19 Mar 19)

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CFP:  Panel at RSA 2019 (Toronto, 17-19 Mar 19)

Embodying Value: Representing Money in the Early Modern Period

Deadline: July 16, 2018

Joanna Woodall and Natasha Seaman, co-organizers

As media of exchange, coins were essential to trade and economic development in the early modern period. Their double-sided form and the precious materials from which they were made had deep resonance in European culture and beyond. The efficacy of coins depended on faith in their inherent value, yet they were subject to debasement and counterfeiting.  This session seeks papers that explore the signifying potential of money in works of art and how abstract concepts of value intersect with and are figured in material and monetary forms. While the art market may have some relevance to this subject, papers selected will have as their primary focus the particular character of coins and other means of exchange as physical and semiotic entities, money as it appears within images and texts, and how concepts of money and currency can inform our understanding of works of art in this period. Continue reading “CFP: Embodying Value (RSA, Toronto, 17-19 Mar 19)” →

CFP: Art with (or without) the art market (Paris, 24 Feb 18)

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Symposium
“Art with (or without) the Art Market”

INHA, Paris
Deadline: Dec 1, 2017

This call for papers will lead to a symposium and a publication as a thematic issue of Marges, revue d’art contemporain.

The art market has steadily increased in last decades, up to a point where many observers tend to doubt it could ever go back to its initial state. Contemporary art is at the centre of this phenomenon and seems to be feeding the appetites of investors for whom art value escapes by its very nature the ordinary fluctuations of general economic tendencies. It is however difficult to believe that such values are adorned with magic properties: if there is an art market boom, it is not for purely artistic reasons and it has more to do with a group of factors, the most important being economic speculation. Knowing that money has a central role in the imagination of most people, the question has to be asked whether it is still possible to talk about art without mentioning the vast sums it requires. How does the relation between monetary and aesthetic evaluation function? It is indeed difficult to believe that the art market’s recent growth is without consequences on positions within a field of art where income and social positions inequalities are so important. This leads inevitably to questions regarding the relations between aesthetic value and market listings. Continue reading “CFP: Art with (or without) the art market (Paris, 24 Feb 18)” →

CONF: Objects of Exchange: Art and Economic Encounters (Paris, 7-8 Sep 17)

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International Symposium
Institut National d’Histoire de l’art (INHA)
Paris, 07. – 08.09.2017

Org. Alexander Alberro (Columbia University), Sophie Cras (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)

Exchange is classically described by economists as a phenomenon of equalization of values within a given system. When heterogeneous orders of economic rationalities meet, material objects and practices come to embody the paradoxes of dissonant exchange. This symposium aims to explore how artifacts and artistic practices have materialized ruptures within, and encounters between, economic systems in the modern and contemporary period.

PROGRAM

7 September 2017

2.oo pm / Introduction, Alexander Alberro (Columbia University) & Sophie Cras (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) Continue reading “CONF: Objects of Exchange: Art and Economic Encounters (Paris, 7-8 Sep 17)” →

Review: Trading Values in Early Modern Antwerp

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Christine Göttler, Bart Ramakers, and Joanna Woodall, eds.
Trading Values in Early Modern Antwerp 
Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, 64. Leiden: Brill, 2014. 400 pp.;
180 color ills. Cloth
$157.00(9789004272156)

Nadia Baadj
Jan van Kessel I (1626–1679): Crafting a Natural History of Art in Early Modern Antwerp
(Studies in Baroque Art) (Dutch Edition).
Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. 208 pp.;
52 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth
$150.00(9781909400238)

Review by Marisa Anne Bass
CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2017.90

The history of art in early modern Europe would be unthinkable without Antwerp. And yet until quite recently, Antwerp was a place that nobody talked much about. Scholarship on the southern Netherlandish city (now part of Belgium) long remained the province of local historians, the indefatigable Floris Prims notable among them. And while first Pieter Paul Rubens and then Pieter Bruegel the Elder met with increasing art-historical interest following Belgium’s assertion of independence in 1830, a dogged nationalistic approach to their oeuvres meant that the city in which they lived and worked did not generate much attention in its own right. It was the artist as Flemish genius, and not the city as stimulus, that mattered.