The Maastricht Centre for Arts and Culture, Conservation and Heritage (MACCH) is pleased to announce the upcoming conference: Fair and just Practices: Art and heritage worlds from the perspectives of markets and law
18 & 19 March 2016, Maastricht, The Netherlands
Deadline for abstracts: Monday 11 January 2016
Recent developments in art and heritage worlds call to our attention questions of fairness and justice. While art and heritage practices have always been governed, implicitly or explicitly, by standards of fairness and justice, these standards are subject to change and are approached differently from the relevant academic fields of anthropology, cultural studies, economics, history, law, sociology, and the conservation sciences.
This conference aims to analyze and contextualize (un-)fair practices in art and heritage worlds from a variety of disciplinary and trans-disciplinary perspectives. For instance, while we currently witness a global explosion of art and heritage markets with billion-dollar auction sales dominated by ultra rich buyers, most individual artists cannot earn a living wage. And as subsidies are cut for public art and heritage institutions, ever-larger private museums emerge that house the art collections of the super rich – who in return may claim tax reductions for their philanthropy. But these issues of income inequality and distributive justice are by no means the only matters of fairness in art and heritage worlds today: A surge of art forgery cases, the illicit trade in – or restitution of – looted objects of art and heritage, as well as controversies regarding the conservation of artworks hint at further challenges and risks, respectively. How can art and heritage worlds fairly acknowledge these economic, political and ethical challenges and mitigate the legal risks? What are best practices of fairness and justice when it comes to building and reassuring trust and transparency in the market, as well as when it comes to establishing and enforcing necessary legal frameworks and regulations in art and heritage worlds at large?
Convened during The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht, The Netherlands, the conference will take place on Friday 18 March and Saturday 19 March 2016. Please submit paper proposals until Monday 11 January 2016 via email to the conference manager, Yleen Simonis. Proposals should include authors’ name and affiliation as well as contact details, full titles and a 500 words summary. All papers will be delivered in English. We welcome academic as well as professional contributions from various disciplines. The scientific committee reviews all paper proposals and invites the selected speakers in early February. There is a limited budget available to cover the travel and accommodation costs of those in need.
Further information: Conference announcement and call for papers