Matthew Morgan, a PhD student who I co-supervise with Ben Cranfield, is organizing an interesting seminar next week on The Art Market and the Art Museum, to be hosted by Birkbeck’s Centre for Media, Culture and Creative Practice. The event, and Matthew’s research, touches in part on the relations museums have with cities as well as with public life more generally. Full details are below.

The Art Market and the Art Museum
Tuesday 29th May 2012
7.30 – 9.00
Room G04, 43 Gordon Square
Bloomsbury, London
Birkbeck, University of London

Drinks and refreshments provided afterwards

This seminar address issues around the seemingly divergent paths of the currently booming art market and the severe funding issues in UK museums.

In the light of the record prices achieved for works of art by the world’s auction houses and severe cuts in the budgets of UK arts institutions this seminar will investigate whether the impact of the continual rise of the art market is impacting on the traditional functions of the art museum.
Art and art museums have always attracted and been supported by the wealthy. For Foucault and Bourdieu they have been agents of elites and supporters of bourgeois capitalist values. However, an alternative reading of the institution is that it can engender strong community sentiment as well as creating a public sphere for debates on contentious or controversial subjects.

Does a strong art market support the art world or does it undermine the socially engaged practices UK institutions have been engaged in over the last twenty years?

Speakers:

Jonathan Harris, Professor in Global Art and Design Studies and Director of Research at the Winchest School of Art, Southampton University. His books include Identity Theft: The Cultural Colonization of Contemporary Art; Art, Money, Parties: New Institutions in the Political Economy of Contemporary Art; Regenerating Culture and Society: Architecture, Art and Urban Style within the Global Politics of City Branding and, most recently, Globalization and Contemporary Art (Wiley Blackwell USA, 2011).

Gerrie van Noord, lecturer in Arts Policy and Management at Birckbeck. She has worked at De Appel Foundation, as Head of Publishing at arts commissioning organisation Artangel in London and in that capacity commissioned, produced and edited publications with Douglas Gordon, Tony Oursler, Janet Cardiff, Susan Hiller, Michael Landy, Jem Finer and Jeremy Deller among others, as Project Manager of Zenomap, Scotland’s first independent presentation at the Venice Biennale, she regularly works with Lisbon-based curator Jürgen Bock, most recently on several publications on Ângela Ferreira’s work. Currently she is Co-Director of the Artist Pension Trust London, an international mutual trust scheme for future financial benefits for artists. Alongside teaching at Birkbeck, Gerrie has been a Visiting Lecturer at the Master of Fine Arts department of the Glasgow School of Art since 2003.