COUR: International Summer School: Art Markets: an Integrated Perspective (Antwerp & Brussels)

International Summer School: Art Markets: an Integrated Perspective

Antwerp & Brussels, Belgium

6-10 July 2020

registration: 1 April 2020

Following in the success of the first Art Markets Summer School held in Lyon in June 2019, this unique research, training and networking experience will also take place in 2020.

Participants with an academic or professional interest in the mechanics of the art market will join European and American specialists in art history, economics, sociology, finance,and digital humanities. Together, they will present, share, workshop and discuss theoretical approaches, conceptual frameworks and methodological tools in an amical and relaxed atmosphere.

This immersive experience will inspire and shape new interdisciplinary thinking about the emergence, history and governance of art markets around the world.

The art market is essentially a multidisciplinary object of study. While it is now a significant sector of the global economy, it has long played a seminal role in the circulation and reception of art, and provided the context within which artists created their work. Researchers from disciplines as diverse as economics, finance, law, history, art history or sociology have contributed to a better understanding of the complexity and specificity of this market arena. However, despite the advances made in each of these fields, research on the art market still too often suffers from a compartmentalization by discipline.

The Art Markets thematic school aims to bring together the international community of researchers working on the art market and to offer participants the opportunity to better understand the scientific approaches of other disciplines. Sharing a common knowledge base and concepts is a necessary condition for developing transdisciplinary collaborations. To this end, this training offers an interdisciplinary theoretical approach and familiarizes the participants with methodological tools in line with the most up-to-date analytical methods. The interaction between historical and contemporary analyses from the point of view of economics, finance, and sociology is particularly innovative.

In the era of globalization and digital technology, art markets are undergoing profound changes that are leading to a reconfiguration of the modalities of interaction between actors and intermediaries. Issues related to artistic exchanges, the emergence or decline of markets, financial speculation, the concentration of actors and the role of agents in building the economic and social value of art have accelerated the need to use robust analytical techniques to better understand these issues. It is also worthwhile questioning whether these developments are so new. For instance, the role of various institutions such as auction houses or art fairs benefit from being re-examined in the light of their historical roots in order to understand their function in an increasingly global art market system . At the same time, the analysis of contemporary art markets allows us to shed light with the advantage of hindsight on the practices, mechanisms and strategies put in place since the emergence of markets for visual arts from the 16th century onwards. In addition, quantitative analytical methods, data modelling and visualization have paved the way for important methodological and epistemological explorations.

More information on the 2020 Summer School can be found on the website.

CFP: Cultures of Belgian Space / Cultures de l'espace belge, 1850-1924 (Hingene)

CFP: Cultures of Belgian Space / Cultures de l'espace belge, 1850-1924
Kasteel d'Ursel/ d'Ursel Castle, Hingene, Belgium

16-17 October 2020

CFP deadline: 15 March 2020

Keynote speaker: Patrick McGuinness (St Anne's College, Oxford, UK)

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a modern city culture within a globalised economy, built on industrial mass production, an early consumer society, and colonial expansion. Both modernism and colonialism led to the creation of otherness. Non-industrial, pre-modern or exotic societies, and furthermore the racial, moral or female other were not just conceived in reaction to the emergence of modernism, but were also interiorised. Otherness, for example, surfaced in the modern world's own pre-modern past as well as in the unconscious of the modern self, where the remains of the primitive lurked, as both a threat and a source of creativity and primeval meaning. These ambiguities at the very core of modernism continuously reconfigured the relationship between the public and private dimensions of the self, between domesticity and sociability. They equally affected the self-image and the (re)construction of the history of the modern nation states.

The way in which spaces and spatial contexts were experienced, and disciplined their occupiers, or were represented and imagined in art, literature and various types of discourses, is revealing of this process of reconfiguration. Belgium has proven itself particularly susceptible to this process, sometimes in radical and even unique ways. Its position at the crossroads between different traditions and languages, its peripheral situation vis-à-vis French modernism, and its radical sense of self-exoticisation and resilience to self-definition, contributed largely to this susceptibility. In this context, the representation of otherness through imageries of distant or past places, the voyeuristic dimensions of exteriority, the uncanny and ambiguous depictions of domesticity, the masses and the self in the city, shifts in the definition of gender identities and the expectations thereof in public and private spheres, and the interconnections between the home, the museum, the city are but a few of the most salient examples of how spaces and spatial imageries reveal this significant cultural change.

This conference will bring together a number of papers that focus on how spaces can be read as the communication, disruption, counterpoint or subtext of modernism in Belgium. To this end, the chronological scope, from the 1850's and 1860's, when the generation of late nineteenth-century city culture was born, to the publication of the magazine Correspondance in 1924/1925, suggests an open beginning and ending around the central last decades of the nineteenth century. It aims to detect and explore the reshaping and (dis)continuity of legacies, such as that of German subjectivist idealism, as well as to bear in mind, at the same time, the particularly Belgian continuity towards a modernist future and surrealism, towards Flemish expressionism and (proto-) modernist literature.

We expect that proposals will deal with space and focus directly on Belgium and/or Belgian culture. Belgium need not be invoked directly as the topic; but the persons, problems, output and / or spaces, for example, discussed in these presentations will be Belgian. Within this rubric, some suggested topics, themes, and fields of interest might include:

• Architecture and art
• Urban design
• Design
• Space and objects
• Gendered space
• Space and narrative
• Poetic space/ space in poetry
• Interstices
• Liminal spaces
• 'Entrevisions'
• 'Le non-lieu'
• The void and emptiness
• Hidden spaces
• Interior spaces
• Public spaces
• Religious spaces
• Landscape and countryside
• Exhibition and exposition spaces
• Collections
• 'Hausmusik'
• Spaces in music(al) criticism
• Particular spaces/places (town, country, The house, the home, the factory, the greenhouse, the salon, the (theatre) stage, the concert hall, the museum, the studio, the wasteland…)
• Spaces of leisure and spectacle (e.g. the cinema, the zoo, the theatre)
• Etc.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 March 2020. Abstracts for a 20-minute paper in English, French, or Dutch should be sent to: belgianspaces2020@gmail.com

Abstracts should be between around 250-300 words. They can also include up to two images.

Scientific committee: Dominique Bauer (KULeuven), Jason Hartford (University of Dundee), Laurence Brogniez (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Claire Moran (Queen's University Belfast), Marjan Sterckx (Universiteit Gent), in conjunction with the Emile Verhaeren Museum at Sint-Amands (Rik Hemmerijckx)

Organising committee: Dominique Bauer (KULeuven), Laurence Brogniez (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Marjan Sterckx (Universiteit Gent).

All other information about the conference can be found here.

CONF: Verzamelen, herwaarderen en schenken: Het belang van private kunstcollecties in België en Nederland, 19de eeuw tot vandaag

CONF: Verzamelen, herwaarderen en schenken: Het belang van private kunstcollecties in België en Nederland, 19de eeuw tot vandaag
Museum Mayer van den Bergh, i.s.m. het KMSKA, Rubenianum, UAntwerpen & FARO
Rubenianum, Kolveniersstraat 20, 2000 Antwerpen
13 maart 2020, 09:00-18:15

Private kunstcollecties zijn vandaag een veelbesproken en boeiend item. Er is een groeiende belangstelling voor samenwerkingen en partnerships met private collectioneurs. Het Museum Mayer van den Bergh – zelf ontstaan als een privéverzameling – organiseert samen met Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen een studiedag hierover in Antwerpen.

Op 13 maart vindt de studiedag ‘Verzamelen, herwaarderen en schenken. Het belang van private kunstcollecties in België en Nederland, van de 19de eeuw tot vandaag’ plaats in het Antwerpse Rubenianum. Specialisten uit Nederland en België gaan dieper in op de oorsprong en de ontwikkeling van het private verzamelen en schenken van 15de- en 16de-eeuwse kunst in België en Nederland. Er wordt bekeken welke rol private verzamelaars en schenkers van (oude) kunst in het hedendaagse culturele leven spelen en hoe relevant hun activiteit vandaag is.

Verschillende vragen komen hierbij aan bod. Wat zijn de motivaties van verzamelaars en schenkers? Hoe zien hun persoonlijke profielen en netwerken eruit? In welke historische en politieke context handel(d)en zij? Wat zijn de meest recente trends en ontwikkelingen in die verzamel- en schenkingscultuur? En welk juridisch en fiscaal kader is er voor schenkingen en legaten?

De dag wordt afgesloten met een keynote lezing en een debat over wat private verzamelaars, schenkers en openbare musea vandaag en in de toekomst voor elkaar kunnen betekenen.

Aanleiding is de tentoonstelling Madonna ontmoet Dulle Griet. Verzamelaars in topstukken gevat, een expo over collectioneurs Fritz Mayer van den Bergh en Florent van Ertborn, en de publicatie van een nieuw boek dat gewijd is aan 200 jaar kunstschenkingen aan het KMSKA.

Hier vindt u het volledige programma, en kan u uw ticket reserveren.

De studiedag is een gezamenlijke realisatie van Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (KMSKA), Rubenianum, Universiteit Antwerpen – Centrum voor Stadsgeschiedenis en FARO – Vlaams Steunpunt voor cultureel erfgoed vzw.