TODAY: TIAMSA Live Book Discussion No. 6 – Anne-Sophie V. Radermecker: Anonymous Art at Auction. The Reception of Early Flemish Paintings in the Western Art Market, 1946–2015 (online 14 April 2022, 6:30pm CET)


TIAMSA welcomes you to our 6th Live Book Discussion.

Respondents: Sandra van Ginhoven (Getty Research Institute) and Hans van Miegroet (Duke University)
As usual, the event will be moderated by Kim Oosterlinck (Université libre de Bruxelles). All attendants will be invited to join the discussion!

Please RSVP to inna.schill@artmarketstudies.org.

About the book:
Working with a data set accounting for 13,000 auction sales results, Anne-Sophie V. Radermecker explores what contemporary buyers value when purchasing paintings of unknown or uncertain authorship, and which variables influence price formation mechanisms in this market segment. The principle finding of this book is not only that historical names matter in the art market, but so do all other alternative identification strategies that art market players use to label anonymous paintings. Indirect names, provisional names, and spatiotemporal designations function as substitutes for real names that simulate identities, create ex-post stories around the artworks offered for sale, and, consequently, reduce information asymmetry about an artist’s identity, with, at time, quite unexpected effects on price.

About the speakers:
Sandra van Ginhoven (PhD. Duke University 2015)  is Head of the Project for the Study of Collecting and Provenance at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where she oversees the development of the Getty Provenance Index® (GPI) databases and related research projects. Her research on the history of the art markets and the art trade between the Southern Netherlands and Spanish America during the seventeenth century was published by Brill in 2016. In addition to the remodel of the GPI as Linked Open Data, her current work focuses on applying data analysis and visualization techniques to study provenance, histories of collecting and the art markets.

Anne-Sophie V. Radermecker holds a Ph.D. in Art history/Cultural Economics from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She is a former B.A.E.F. fellow at Duke University (DALMI) and lecturer at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Since 2021, she is a research associate and lecturer in Cultural Management at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Her main research interests are the economics of art and culture, early modern art and the market for old master paintings, the economics of antiques and indeterminate works of art, the reciprocal interactions between museums and the art market (incl. acquisition policies and deaccessioning), and quantitative methods applied to art history. She has published several cross-disciplinary papers in both economic (JEBO, JCEC) and art historical journals (IJDAH, NKJ, Marges).

Hans Van Miegroet is Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University. He was trained at the Higher Institute for Art History and Archaeology of the University of Ghent (Belgium) and received his Ph.D. at the University of California. He is engaged in exploring Visual Studies at the interface of the humanities, social sciences, law and the sciences. He has adopted a scientific collaborative model to conducting research on emerging Art Markets, legal questions related to copyright and cultural heritage and visual culture as a commercial pursuit. This approach has made it possible to create, and sustain, a variety of new research strategies and modes of interpretation, attractive to scholars and students from the humanities, law, the natural sciences and the social sciences.

TIAMSA Discount:
“Anonymous Art at Auction“ is available for TIAMSA members with a 25% discount. Please look out for our forthcoming announcement.