Art Collections Research Articles

Estate planning for art collections—a German perspective

Abstract Under German law, artworks are highly attractive assets when it comes to estate planning for various reasons: First, the valuation method to be used is favourable, secondly, if applicable, payment of taxes with artworks instead of cash can ease liquidity issues, and thirdly, donations to public-benefit organizations can significantly reduce tax liabilities. Last but not least, artworks in private collections may be eligible for tax exemptions of either 60% or 100%. In the course of such estate planning in relation to artworks, it is important to consider certain provisions of inheritance law to avoid disputes among the future heirs and, if the testator wishes so, to protect the integrity of the art collection.

Case Study of Chinese Traditional Martial Arts Inheritance Based on Deep Learning

With the development of modern science and technology, computer technology is more and more applied to the learning and development of martial arts. In order to study and expand the way of martial arts, this paper analyzes the role of the traditional way of martial arts teaching mode and computer-aided teaching mode. Computer technology breaks old ideas, breaks traditional teaching methods, and promotes the learning and development of martial arts. The way of martial arts collection is the combination of a series of movements, which means the protective significance of boxing and attack. Based on the analysis of the current emotional state of students and its reasons, this paper studies the positive influence of various elements of traditional martial arts on students’ emotional states and puts forward specific measures to enhance the positive effect of traditional martial arts on students’ emotional states.

Stability Assessment of the Maltravieso Cave (Caceres, Spain) Through Engineering Rock Mass Classification, Empirical, Numerical and Remote Techniques

Caves have long fascinated humanity, serving as shelters, canvases for artistic expression and now significant attractions in the realm of tourism. Among these remarkable geological formations, the Maltravieso cave in Extremadura, Spain, stands out for its rich archaeological and paleontological heritage, particularly its collection of Paleolithic rock art. Despite its cultural significance, there is a notable dearth of studies addressing the stability of the cave from an engineering perspective. This article presents a pioneering study aimed at assessing the stability of the Maltravieso cave through a multidisciplinary approach: using empirical geomechanical classifications such as the Q Index, Rock Mass Rating (RMR) and the recently formulated Cave Geomechanical Index (CGI), alongside other techniques like Structure from Motion (SfM), 2D numerical modeling and 3D wedge analysis. This research aims to fill the gap in our opinion of cave stability assessment. By combining field data collection with sophisticated analysis methods, this study seeks to provide valuable insights into the geomechanical properties of the Maltravieso cave and validate a simple yet effective methodology for evaluating the stability of natural caves. This work not only contributes to the body of knowledge regarding cave geomechanics but also underscores the importance of preserving these invaluable cultural and geological treasures for future generations.

From here to eternity: The rise and fall of global art worlds and the contemporary private museum

The process of converting a private collection into a public museum is often presented as a means of ensuring a collection’s future by transforming it into an enduring asset for future generations. This case study assesses contemporary collection models as well as entrepreneurial investor-collectors and their respective museum-building strategies by addressing two fundamental questions: (1) What is the role of the contemporary art collector and private museum and (2) How do their interactions with art markets challenge the established protocols and hierarchies of the global art network? It shall be argued that private collection museums often have a limited lifespan. Furthermore, the future of private collections and museums is often determined within the lifetimes of their creators. This can play out in one of four ways: first, collectors may offer artworks at high-profile auction houses; second, they may sell the art collection and close the museum or collector’s exhibition space; third, they may sell the museum or exhibition space. Alternatively, private collectors, along with their museums and art collections, can play an important role on the global stage. However, more rigorous planning is necessary for these collectors to distinguish themselves, expand the cultural landscape, and ensure their collections endure within or beyond their creators’ lifetime.

Sir William Burrell: An Artful Politician

This article discusses the political career of Sir William Burrell (1861–1958) as a Conservative party councillor for Glasgow's Exchange ward (1899–1906) and focuses on the years 1899–1901, in three overlapping arenas: the 1899 municipal elections in which Burrell began his career; Glasgow's civic and business status as the second city of the British empire; and the 1901 international exhibition. By examining Burrell as a skilful operator in all three contexts simultaneously, this article presents him for the first time not only as a powerful Glaswegian businessman who collected art, but also as an adroit politician who exploited both his business success and his curatorial expertise for the benefit of the Conservative and Liberal Unionist cause in the city. His administration and curation of the international exhibition in the new Kelvingrove galleries allowed the dominant Unionist group to present itself to millions of visitors. Burrell's art collection is thus demonstrated to be an important political source.

Predictive Modelling Using Museum Data

Museums face challenges in maintaining and preserving their vast collections, particularly when identifying artworks that require restoration and detecting potential forgeries. This project leverages machine learning models to enhance museum collection management. Using data from a museum collection, Random Forest and Isolation Forest algorithms predict restoration needs and detect forgeries, respectively. The results show high accuracy in restoration prediction, with Age at Acquisition being the most significant feature. Forgery detection flagged 1,303 potential cases, providing museums with valuable insights for further investigation. This approach streamlines operational processes and ensures the long-term preservation and authenticity of art collections.

Emerging Scholars Researching Black British Histories (mid-Eighteenth to mid-Nineteenth Centuries)

Abstract Recent years have seen a vast expansion of scholarly interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black British histories, and increasing calls to support the work of early-career scholars (ECRs) in this field. Yet ECRs continue to face several specific challenges in conducting this crucial research. This section consists of a brief introduction and two case studies based on the research and experiences of Ph.D. students Annabelle Gilmore and Montaz Marché. Gilmore aims to amplify the connections between the lives and labour of enslaved people on plantations in Jamaica and the wealth and art collection of William Thomas Beckford, now held at Charlecote Park, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Marché seeks to trace the presence of Black women in eighteenth-century London, drawing on archival documents that provide traces of who these women may have been, and confronting the limitations of the traditional archive. Together, these pieces offer a glimpse into how these ECRs are positioning themselves within the historiography as well as considering how they hope to contribute to the field.

Reimagining Engagement: A Case Study of Interactive Educational Programs in Art Museums

This case study examines the educational programs the Musée de l'Orangerie offers in Paris, focusing on its interactive and immersive approaches to art education. The museum, known for its Impressionist and Modern art collection, provides various educational programs tailored to different age groups and backgrounds, including children's, family, school, and adult programs. These programs aim to enhance visitors' understanding and appreciation of art through hands-on activities, guided tours, and digital platforms.

Private art collectors on motivations to donate, deposit, or lend out artworks in Norway

ABSTRACT Based on interviews with twelve art collectors, the following paper investigates the motivations driving art collectors to engage in donations, deposits, and short-term loans to publicly funded art museums, using Norway as an example. Additionally, it delves into the reasons behind their reluctance to contribute. It also probes deeper into the role of price as an objective valuation. This study’s findings reveal personal, economic, and societal influences on art collectors’ decisions to contribute, including the joy of seeing their art exhibited, making art publicly accessible, storage considerations, promoting Norwegian artists internationally, and fulfilling social responsibility. The rationale behind not donating is closely tied to art collectors’ demands and preferences for their artworks or collections, as well as personal and financial reasons.

Virtual Platform for Museum: A Case Study with Oman Across Ages Museum

Abstract: The Virtual Platform for Oman across Ages Museum (VPOAAM) is a project initiated in 2015 in Manah, Al Dakhiliyah Governorate, aiming to highlight the unique qualities of the Sultanate of Oman and its features, ancient history, and Renaissance. The project, designed in the shape of mountains, was initiated by His Majesty Sultan Haitham bin Tariq the Great. The project is situated on a 300,000 square meter land area with a building area of 66,591 square meters, designed in the shape of mountains. The late Sultan Qaboos bin Said laid the foundation stone for the project, which inspires architectural innovation and showcases the Sultanate of Oman's qualitative transition from its historical splendors to its bright present. Visitors can explore the museum's art and historical collection online, with interactive virtual tours allowing them to interact and learn about art pieces and exhibits. The museum also contains a wide range of multimedia, including images, videos, written texts, and audio information, allowing visitors to interact with antiques and artistic exhibits. These are a glance of the museum we taken as case study to develop the platform with the approval and kind support from the competent authority of the museum. After successful completion of the research project; the output will be the same museum in a virtual platform. This research conducted with a number of items among thousands of physical items in the museum. And the result shows a significant remark to continue and complete the virtual museum platform for the stated museum.

The British Art Section of the 1906–1907 New Zealand International Exhibition: Its Complexities and Contributions to New Zealand’s Art History

The British Art Section of the 1906–7 New Zealand International Exhibition in Christchurch remains the largest exhibition of British art in New Zealand history. However, its cultural impact has been little explored in art history scholarship. This article addresses contrasting interpretations of the section by examining its origins, purchases and legacies, reconsidering and recontextualising previous analysis by art historians Linda Tyler and Warren Feeney. The success of the section neither devastated nor revitalised the work of local artists, but instead reinforced the continued importance of purchasing British art for New Zealand and the pivotal role it played in shaping this country’s nascent art collections.

Classification of painting styles based on the difference component

The digitisation and classification of artwork are crucial tasks in the management of art collections. However, the scarcity of some styles makes it difficult to obtain sufficient and representative samples in deep learning models, leading to sub-optimal classification performance. This study proposed a difference component for few-shot learning to improve the classification accuracy of existing models on few-shot data. First, the method pre-processes the sample data by permuting limited samples with sufficient data to generate related samples. Subsequently, sets of positive and negative samples with the same scale are generated, containing and not containing the limited samples. Second, a difference component model is constructed to learn the non-linear division among samples contained in the related samples. This is then combined with the existing classification model to determine whether the related samples contain limited samples. Finally, the types of each sample contained in related samples are analysed based on the types of related samples. The results of the multiple experiments demonstrate that the difference component can effectively learn the differential features between combinations of artworks. The combination of the existing classification model and the proposed difference component model has been demonstrated to effectively improve the classification accuracy of few-shot works. In addition, the classification result was superior to that of other baseline methods used for few-sample learning.

‘Der Todtenkopf soll mir zu Ehren wegbleiben’: Ottilie Goethes Zuarbeiten für Anna Jameson

ABSTRACT This article examines Ottilie (von) Goethe's work for Anna Jameson and her preference for anonymity in the context of creative women’s struggle for self-determination. I ponder whether Goethe may have contributed illustrations in Jameson's anthology A Commonplace Book (1854), investigating for the first time their sources and, where applicable, previous discussion or publication: I can proof that the ‘Daughter of Fire’ and two compositions with cupids are reproductions of creations by the late-romantic painter Moritz von Schwind, a friend of Ottilie Goethe, while the statuette of an owlet on a youth's head from Johann Wolfgang Goethe's art collection as well as an enigmatic vignette of a skull are likely original designs. Goethe’s daughter-in-law can be connected with all three illustrations, and therefore she may have provided the drawings for the reproductions or at least have stimulated Jameson to include them in her illustrated book of excerpts, quotes, and new writings.

Miniaturists — Graduates of the Imperial Academy of Arts on the Modern Art Market

Graduates of the portrait miniature class at the Imperial Academy of Arts, which operated for more than half a century, were many first-class miniaturists whose names are now, unfortunately, known only to specialists. By now, most leading museums have published their collections of portrait miniatures, but historically, none of the researchers have considered the study of the art market (and the miniatures of academician artists appearing on it) as an opportunity, firstly, to identify new works of miniature art, and secondly, to find out whether an artist’s academic education or title influences contemporary pricing and the interest of buyers (which can be private collectors or museums) in his works.Nevertheless, it is the information on the functioning of the art market that provides data for more in-depth and comprehensive research. Thus, the sales index of a certain author much more clearly than numerous exhibitions can show its demand among art lovers. It should be noted that not all users of auction platforms are professional collectors. There are cases when personal exhibitions of artists did not contribute to the growth of interest in their work on the part of art collectors. There is also an opposite situation, when works by artists about whom only a rare researcher knows become a desiderata for many collectors. The present study expands the understanding of the place on the contemporary art market of Russian miniaturists associated with the Academy of Arts (its graduates and academicians), and makes it possible to fill in the gaps in the attribution and identification of the peculiarities of their works. It is concluded that there is no direct connection between the fact of studying at the Imperial Academy of Arts and the prices of their works, but the high artistic level of miniatures allows us to say that the title of academician was indeed given to the most worthy masters.

Unorchestrated Symphony: documenta fifteen as a Site of Resistance

documenta fifteen (d15) was held in Kassel, Germany from June to September 2022, and sparked heated media attention and critical discussions before, during, and after the exhibition. With the indigenous curatorial concept of lumbung, the artistic directors, ruangrupa, a Jakarta-based artist collective, brought a new corpus of artists, artist collectives, artistic projects, and cosmologies largely from the global south to d15. Notwithstanding its decentralised curatorial method and rhizomatic exhibition structure, many critiques of d15 continue to take a top-down approach, focusing on its overarching structure, curatorial discourse, the curators’ trajectory, collective methodology, and the context of international mega-exhibitions. With a bottom-up approach and a lumbung community perspective, this essay examines some of the lumbung practices, including but not limited to social gatherings with feasts and festivals, struggles for land and natural resources, and women and queer groups’ practices. The essay argues that, in spite of challenges and limitations, the lumbung community have enabled d15 to become a site of resistance to colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy, a proposition that aligns with the initial vision for d15.

Salvaging Art Collections in the Face of Natural Disasters: Challenges and Outcomes

ABSTRACT A case study describes the impact on a collection of the extreme floods in eastern Australia in February 2022, and the salvaging of the Lismore Regional Art Gallery art collection. Despite predetermined protocols and preparedness efforts, the gallery suffered unprecedented flooding, requiring coordinated solutions to support emergency recovery. The project included relocating and stabilising around 1400 artworks, divided between the permanent collection and temporary exhibitions. Coordinated collaboration with stakeholders was needed to determine which artworks were salvageable; initial assessments indicated 60%. However, after further assessment this was reduced to 40% of all artworks able to be returned to a condition suitable for storage and display. The paper focuses on the assessment criteria used to prioritise artworks for salvage and conservation: insurance value, condition post-flooding, the views of living artists on display of treated works, and sentimental and community importance. It also outlines the conservation processes for flood-damaged paintings on canvas, works on paper, and photographgraphs, highlighting challenges and outcomes.

Beyond ‘Frustration’: Rethinking Participation and Collectivity in documenta fifteen

The fifteenth edition of documenta, promoted as a ‘participatory event’ (Mitmach-documenta), not only ‘disappointed’ due to controversies related to anti-Semitism, but also due to the so-called ‘limited realisation of the promoted art participation’. This article explores the intertwining dynamics of participation and collectivity through the contributions of three Indonesian art collectives at documenta fifteen. Employing Sruti Bala’s expanded notion of participatory art, transcending the dichotomy of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ participation, a more nuanced perspective on documenta fifteen is developed. Local genealogies of participatory art within the Indonesian context, as well as their global translation in Kassel, are taken into consideration. To that end, the article opens up critical entry points for re-evaluating documenta from a multi-sited research perspective, based on the experiences of visitors, documenta staff, the art collectives, and their contributions. The objective is to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between participation and collectivity in documenta fifteen from a transcultural perspective.

The Role of Art Collecting in Entrepreneurial Families

The Role of Art Collecting in Entrepreneurial Families

Amatsuchi Kosaku: Reconsidering Postwar Japanese Art History from a Perspective of Ecology

This paper discusses Amatsuchi Kosaku, an artist collective that formed in the late 1980s and continued its unique activities until the early 2000s. Because Amatsuchi Kosaku was based in Shizuoka, it was excluded from the normative narrative of Japanese art history, which has been constructed around artists and artist collectives working in metropolises like Tokyo and Kyoto. This paper examines the “metropolitan-centrism” in the Japanese art history, and reconsiders the artistic practice of Amatsuchi Kosaku, from the perspective of “ecology,” a concept that has been the focus of much attention in recent contemporary art discourse.

COLLECTIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF PRINT MAKING IN YOGYAKARTA: A THEORETICAL STUDY OF ART AND SOCIETY

The research entitled ‘Ethnography of Graphic Printmaking Collective in Yogyakarta: A Theoretical Study of Art and Society’ aims to analyse the institutionalisation process of two graphic print art collectives in Yogayakarta, namely: Grafis Minggiran and Krack! Printmaking Studio, and its influence on the art scene. The method that will be used in this research is ethnographic method with data collection techniques in the form of interviews and literature studies. This method was chosen in order to obtain a detailed depth of data from the experiences of the two graphic printmaking collectives. The results of this research are: (1) Both printmaking collectives endeavour to respond to art conventions (especially about techniques) in their art practices; (2) The formation of the collective is an on-campus tradition that spreads out; (3) Krack! Printmaking consistently makes the screen printing technique as a medium of expression in the realm of graphic printing art; (4) Krack! Printmaking then made the phrase ‘Ojo Wedi Mbleset’ (‘Don't be afraid to miss’) as their credo in carrying out the practice of silk screen/screen printing; (5) Grafis Minggiran makes the introduction of a wealth of techniques as its vision in art; (6) Grafis Minggiran is known as one of the (non-campus) graphic collectives that emerged the earliest and at the same time the initiator of the Yogyakarta Graphic Arts Week event.