Art Markets And Digital Histories

This Special Issue of Arts investigates the use of digital methods in the study of art markets and their histories. As historical and contemporary data is rapidly becoming more available, and digital technologies are becoming integral to research in the humanities and social sciences, we sought to bring together contributions that reflect on the different strategies that art market scholars employ to navigate and negotiate digital techniques and resources. The essays in this issue cover a wide range of topics and research questions. Taken together, the essays offer a reflection on what takes to research art markets, which includes addressing difficult topics such as the nature of the research questions and the data available to us, and the conceptual aspects of art markets, in order to define and operationalize variables and to interpret visual and statistical patterns for scholarship. In our view, this discussion is enriched when also taking into account how to use shared or interoperable ontologies and vocabularies to define concepts and relationships that facilitate the use and exchange of linked (open) data for cultural heritage and historical research.

This Special Issue of Arts investigates the use of digital methods in the study of art markets and their histories. As historical and contemporary data is rapidly becoming more available, and digital technologies are becoming integral to research in the humanities and social sciences, we sought to bring together contributions that reflect on the different strategies that art market scholars employ to navigate and negotiate digital techniques and resources. The essays in this issue cover a wide range of topics and research questions. Taken together, the essays offer a reflection on what takes to research art markets, which includes addressing difficult topics such as the nature of the research questions and the data available to us, and the conceptual aspects of art markets, in order to define and operationalize variables and to interpret visual and statistical patterns for scholarship. In our view, this discussion is enriched when also taking into account how to use shared or interoperable ontologies and vocabularies to define concepts and relationships that facilitate the use and exchange of linked (open) data for cultural heritage and historical research.

This is the first sourcebook to trace the emergence and evolution of art markets in the Western economy, framing them within the larger narrative of the ascendancy of capitalist markets. Selected writings from across academic disciplines present compelling evidence of art’s inherent commercial dimension and show how artists, dealers, and collectors have interacted over time, from the city-states of Quattrocento Italy to the high-stakes markets of postmillennial New York and Beijing. This approach casts a startling new light on the traditional concerns of art history and aesthetics, revealing much that is provocative, profound, and occasionally even comic. This volume’s unique historical perspective makes it appropriate for use in college courses and postgraduate and professional programs, as well as for professionals working in art-related environments such as museums, galleries, and auction houses.

The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History offers a broad survey of cutting-edge intersections between digital technologies and the study of art history, museum practices, and cultural heritage. The volume focuses not only on new computational tools that have been developed for the study of artworks and their histories but also debates the disciplinary opportunities and challenges that have emerged in response to the use of digital resources and methodologies. Chapters cover a wide range of technical and conceptual themes that define the current state of the field and outline strategies for future development. This book offers a timely perspective on trans-disciplinary developments that are reshaping art historical research, conservation, and teaching. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, historical theory, method and historiography, and research methods in education.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the professional activities of the art business. Addressing this fast-moving industry, The Art Business: Art World, Art Market analyses the sector’s institutions and structures, including galleries, auction houses and art fairs. The rapid development of art finance and its deployment of art as an asset class are covered, and up to moment observations are delivered on the quickly evolving auction system that includes dramatic changes at the major auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s. This edition highlights growing crises in the market including the ever more unbearable costs of art fair attendance and the lack of a reliable system for establishing ownership and title of artworks. Ever more pressing ethical issues such as toxic museum donors, cultural heritage compliance, and problems of corrupt provenances are explored in detail. Enhanced by new data analytics on the US art market, the author also distils advice and guidance for working art professionals hoping to build their careers. The result is an up-to-date picture of an art business suitable for students and practitioners across the creative sector.

What is the story of digital art? Tracing the medium from its roots in constructivist and futurist fantasies to today's complex virtual realities, Nicholas Lambert has written the first rigorous art historical account of digital art's evolution since 1945. Unlike so many artistic developments, digital art has never belonged to a single and canonical movement; its genesis reflects a multiplicity of philosophical viewpoints and technological discoveries. The book chronicles the major artists, exhibitions and institutions key to the medium's story, and explores the revolutionary impact of algorithms, networked mobile devices, immateriality and artificial intelligence on recent art production. This is the defining history of digital art.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Paris was the capital of the art world. While this is usually understood to mean that Paris was the center of art production and trading, this book examines a phenomenon that has received little attention thus far: Paris-based dealers relied on an ever-expanding international network of peers. Many of the city's galleries capitalized on foreign collectors' interest by expanding globally and proactively cultivating transnational alliances. If the French capital drew artists from around the world-from Cassatt to Picasso-the contemporary-art market was international in scope. Art dealers deliberately tapped into a growing pool of discerning collectors in northern and eastern Europe, the UK, and the USA. International trade was rendered not just desirable but necessary by the devastating effects of wars, revolutions, currency devaluation and market crashes which stalled collecting in Europe. Pioneers of the Global Art Market assembles original scholarship based on a close inspection of and fresh perspective on extant dealer records. It caters to an amplified curiosity concerning the emergence and workings of our unprecedented contemporary-centric and global art market. This anthology fills a significant gap in the expanding field of art market studies by addressing how, initially, contemporary art, which is now known as historical modernism, made its way into collections: who validated what by promoting and selling it, where, and how. It includes unpublished material, concrete examples, bibliographical and archival references, and should appeal to academics, curators, educators, dealers, collectors, artists and art lovers alike. It celebrates the modern art dealer as transnational impresario, the global reach of the modern-art market, and the impact of traders on the history of collecting, and ultimately on the history of art.

In the mid-twentieth century the digital revolution began with the introduction of the first electronic computers, which were first introduced into companies and in the state bodies then they spread strongly in the private houses as personal computers; later all these computers were connected to each other by a global telecommunication network called Internet, which had a massive development at the end of the century becoming the backbone of the worldwide information circulation. At the beginning of the 21st century the digital revolution was completed and the information of any kind (texts, images, video clips and TV broadcasts, music and songs, WEB pages) started to be recorded and disseminated in digital form rather than with a traditional media (paper, film, magnetic tape), with a displacement that engaged all human activities of any type, both collective and individual. While the development of digital technology continue at an accelerated pace the problem of information retention begin to arise, what was previously mainly entrusted to printing on paper and now is in abandonment phase: printed records are increasingly transformed into digital format and the new information is generated directly in electronic form. But while a book or a letter could be read directly even centuries after their writing, digital information has a short life because of the same technological development, that makes quickly obsolete any recording by irreversibly mutating both its hardware and reading software; other recordings arethen volatile by their very nature, such as e-mails or WEB pages, even if they could host information that could be of value in the future. Moreover digital recordings are carried out in a great variety of different formats, sometimes incompatible with each other or subject themselves to obsolescence, thus unnecessarily complicating the task of preserving their content. Most part of human culture, gradually poured into electronic form, is now jeopardized, and we risk of delivering to posterity a world without history: this book describes the current situation and what is sought to do to remedy the danger.