AHT 211T Collecting and the Art Market in the Age of Globalization
In 2017, Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvador Mundi was sold for $450.3m during an evening auction at Christie’s New York to the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism, setting a record high for a painting sold at auction. Over the past 15 years, the search for status symbols by new collectors from all corners of the earth is driving the prices of masterpieces. Are these prices higher than they should be? How do you convert cultural value into monetary wealth? Is the art market promoting the production of art for financial speculation? Do artists produce for the market sales or for poetic reasons? What are the implications for museums and its art-interested public? Is the art market fostering the illicit trade of stolen and looted antiquities? What is the role of art and culture for multinationals when it comes to corporate citizenship? These are some of the issues the course addresses, together with looking at collecting from a historical point of view: princely and scholarly collections in the Renaissance, the Wunderkammer, the birth of the public art museum, and the invention of the private art market. Further emphasis will be placed on the question of "who owns the past?" discussing art restitution within the international legal context.
The main destination for this Academic Travel course will be the Benelux countries, Holland and Belgium. In the cities of Amsterdam, Delft, De Hague, and Antwerp the course will explore the birth of the free art market, public museum collections, private galleries, and organizations that set international directives for art restitution.