Stellenbosch, South Africa (WEHC, The XVIth World Economic History
Congress), July 9 - 13, 2012
Deadline: Mar 1, 2012

Session:
The Art of Trading Art. Negotiating the Economic Value of European Art
in Asia and the Americas, 1600-1900

What is value in the art world, are there any formal criterions and who
defines the concept? Questions like these are not only relevant for our
contemporary society, as our current perception of value in the arts is
the unwitting result of a century-long process of consideration,
deliberation and canonization. Research on the European art market of
the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries is increasingly adopting a
distinct postmodern approach to the value of paintings, tapestries and
other works of art, as the neoclassical framework that governed earlier
literature on price formation in the historical art markets sometimes
proved too rigid. More and more economic and art historians are
analyzing value within specific historical settings, and increasingly
demystify the market value of art as a complex social, cultural and
material construction.

Although this recent research strand brought forward crucial
adaptations to the neoclassical framework of art market research, it
essentially struggles with the fundamental legitimacy of its own
claims. To what extent is this deconstruction of economic value nothing
more than a mere Western perspective on an essentially global
historical issue? Research into non-European repertoires of art
evaluation in the early modern world is urgently needed to overcome
this postmodern circular reasoning. In the wake of early globalisation
the Western concept of value of art was not simply exported overseas
from the seventeenth century onwards: in their effort to market
European art, foreign agents had to be sensible to specific demand
patterns of local buyers and their repertoires of evaluation. The
economic value of European art objects was hardy a given in (early)
modern Asia and the Americas, but had to be constantly (re)negotiated
and (re)defined in the social and cultural contexts.

Building on the growing literature on economic and artistic interaction
between East and West, this session seeks to further explore the trade
of European art in Asia and the Americas from the early seventeenth to
the late nineteenth centuries. The organizers welcome papers that
address the concept of 'value' in the context of the art trade in Asia
and the Americas, that preferably - but not exclusively - focus on one
of these clusters:

- The geography of the art trade, both the physical (location of sale)
and mental (discourse on art trade): how did various cultural variables
influence the perceived value of European art in an Asian and/or
American setting? Selling the same European painting in a specific
salesroom, an outdoor public sale or in the privacy of the buyer's
house would likely yield different prices, quite similar to how
cross-cultural discourse - developed by players both in- and outside
the art trade -could impact the economic value Western art in a
non-European context.
- The agents of the art trade, both from a European and an
Asian/American perspective: how did the players involved in the art
trade influenced the value-formation of objects? Trading European art
was quite different for diplomats than for dealers, and Asian or
American dignitaries had different sensitivities than third-generation
Western emigrants. Identifying the main protagonists in the
cross-cultural art trade, as well as the social structure of the
distribution networks bridging different continents will allow us to
elaborate on this crucial question.
- The objects of the art trade: how did the different materiality of
the European artwork influence the value-setting mechanism in the Asias
and the Americas? Different commercial strategies were necessary to
negotiate the value of a European painting, a sculpture, a drawing or a
print. In addition, were these works of art integrated in existing
repertoires of evaluation and systematically compared with local
produce, or rather conceptualised and labelled as foreign?

Paper proposals should be sent to [log in to unmask] before March 1,
2012. All proposals should include a title, abstract of approximately
250 words and contact information. Applicants will be notified within
two weeks after the deadline.

Session organisers:
Yoriko Kobayashi-Sato (Mejiro University Tokyo, Japan), Hans Van
Miegroet (Duke University, USA) and Dries Lyna (University of Antwerp,
Belgium)

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