Chair

Alicja Jagielska Burduk (University of Opole, Poland and UNITWIN Culture in Emergencies) and Ana Filipa Vrdoljak (University of Technology, Sydney)

Panellists

Ana Filipa Vrdoljak (University of Technology, Sydney), Claudia S. Quinones Vila (Canvas Art Law, London) and Alicja Jagielska Burduk (University of Opole, Poland and UNITWIN Culture in Emergencies), Anne-Sophie Radermecker and Federica Aramu (Université libre de Bruxelles), Alessia Crotta (Université libre de Bruxelles), Anne-Sophie Radermecker (Université libre de Bruxelles)

The legal and ethical obligations of art market actors during times of crisis

Ana Filipa Vrdoljak (University of Technology, Sydney)

This paper examines the development of the legal and ethical obligations of art market actors during times of crises, in the twenty-first century. It starts with the legal and ethical obligations for art market actors, including art dealers, explicitly flagged in the 1970 UNESCO Convention and the related 1995 UNIDROIT Convention and Code of Ethics for Art Dealers, currently being reviewed and revised. How these normative and ethical standards have evolved in the last quarter century in response to crises is considered with reference to UN Security Council resolutions and recent regional and national legal instruments on money laundering. 

Rethinking Due Diligence and Adapting to new challenges in the art market

Claudia S. Quinones Vila (Canvas Art Law, London) and Alicja Jagielska Burduk (University of Opole, Poland and UNITWIN Culture in Emergencies)

Due diligence is a cornerstone of the art market and provenance research, but in the absence of uniform standards (mainly due to diverging concepts in national law, e.g. good faith purchasers) it has become necessary to evaluate the efficiency of existing approaches. While the established principles of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property and the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects should not be discarded altogether, the emergence of new types of media and technologies as well as circumstances such as the COVID-19 pandemic require further consideration on how due diligence operates in practice in our current world. The international legal framework on cultural property protection needs a progressive interpretation to accommodate these internal and external factors. The role of policy, operational guidelines, model provisions, and other soft law mechanisms should also be considered. This presentation will discuss practical approaches on how to exercise due diligence in various contexts, including new objects appearing on the market (NFTs, AI and digital art), online sales without in- person inspections, and the use of available databases and information to corroborate provenance details. For instance, while many dealers and museums use 1970 as a cutoff date for provenance when acquiring artwork and cultural objects, this fails to consider the enactment of patrimony laws and export restrictions in the relevant countries of origin. A shift in approach to allow for broader research using publicly available sources (e.g. UNESCO Database of Cultural Heritage Laws) would not only strengthen a buyer’s position, avoiding future embarrassment and legal liability, but also lessen the operational and economic burden on national governments seeking the restitution of looted heritage. Moreover, given the prevalence of multijurisdictional transactions in the art market, the formation of working groups with expert participants from various regions can yield beneficial results in the form of knowledge exchange and broad perspectives. Establishing a dialogue and cooperative relationships is a crucial step in tracking down illicitly trafficked and exported objects and negotiating their return or other solutions. With respect to online sales and digital art, soft law and working groups would also be useful to discuss applicable regulations and lessons learned. Given the general lack of established legislation in this area (although efforts are ongoing, e.g. EU AI Act), contributions from experts would provide much-needed feedback that can be implemented into policy. Our goal is to present a roadmap on how due diligence can evolve in our post-digital world while taking into account the great advances that have been made over the past 50 years at the international level. We will also discuss the joint UNESCO/INTERPOL Virtual Museum of Stolen Artifacts, which is the first immersive museum to feature objects affected by illicit trafficking, as the next phase in awareness raising and recovery. 

Exploring the consumption of fine arts versus ordinary antiques

Anne-Sophie Radermecker and Federica Aramu (Université libre de Bruxelles)

This paper is part of the ERC project MOOVA – Making Old Objects Valuable Again: The Cultural, Economic Challenges, and Sustainability Opportunities of Antiques in the 21st Century. It focuses on the consumption of art versus antiques by analyzing the high-end and low-end segments of the art market from a comparative perspective. These two extreme segments are indeed representative of different contexts (international vs. local) and encompass individuals from various backgrounds and profiles. Importantly, both segments are encountered across most art markets, irrespective of their geographical origins. While the motivations that underlie the acquisition of fine arts are relatively well-documented in the history of collecting, the practice of actively purchasing "ordinary" or "everyday" antiques as fully-fledged cultural goods remains largely overlooked. One may, therefore, wonder whether the acquisition motivations of "high-end" buyers significantly differ from those of more ordinary buyers. To bridge this gap in academic literature, our contribution aims to compare distinct consumption behaviors and habits for fine arts, on one hand, and everyday antiques, on the other, and provide insights into the following research question: To what extent do purchasing motivations differ between the high-end and low-end of the art market? To achieve this goal, specialized media that promote these objects, such as magazines, social media, and sales catalogues, can serve as relevant primary sources to identify different purchasing practices. More specifically, our study relies on two main sources: the British magazine Apollo featuring fine arts and antiques (high- end market) and French periodicals, Antiquités-Brocante and Collectionneur&Chineur, dedicated to ordinary antiques and collectibles (low-end market). Each of these magazines has the advantage of offering specific sections dedicated to portraying a collector through systematic interviews covering topics such as the origins of the collection, purchasing motivations, valuation mechanisms, display habits, and resale practices. These collector interviews will represent a major source for delineating consumption behaviors that characterize both the fine arts and antiques market. Through a comparative discourse analysis, we will explore the reasons that drive individuals to purchase antiques, be it for their aesthetic, utilitarian, historical, or investment value, to name a few. More broadly, this study will shed light on the segmentation of the arts and antiques market, with special attention paid to the evolution of these motivations over time (i.e., the last 10 years). 

The Business of Ordinary Antiques: Business Models in the Contemporary Art Market

Alessia Crotta and Anne-Sophie Radermecker (Université libre de Bruxelles)

In the contemporary fast-paced society, the life cycle of goods has become increasingly shorter, especially for more dated objects. This holds true in the art market too, in which more ordinary objects such as low-end antiques are generally considered out of fashion, and known to be exchanged through informal markets, thrift stores or second-hand shops, unless inherited, gifted or even trashed. Considering the low market value that they fetch, these objects occupy the lowest ends of the art market, and raise questions regarding their business models, practices and sustainability in the future.

In addition to being at the margins of the market for art, ordinary antiques also tend to be positioned at the margins of cultural institutions and scholarly research, which more often focus on market trends and dynamics of the highest end of the market, or at least of fine or high-end antiques. Hence, the issue of how everyday antiques are valued, marketed and sold remains largely underexplored, especially in newly created digital environments. This is of particular relevance in that, in a market in which bargaining and inter-personal interactions prevail, it is reasonable to suspect that online sales may be challenging traditional trading practices and valuation mechanisms at the benefit of the market for ordinary antiques. In fact, a closer look at this market segment reveals the proliferation of online platforms, such as Drouot.com, Catawiki, Selency, Invaluable and Barneby’s, that have recently expanded and diversified the channels through which everyday antiques are exchanged, and extended the borders of this market from local to global. In light of the existence of such platforms, this paper investigates how the platformisation phenomenon has translated into the antiques business in terms of business models that the sector employs. As part of the MOOVA Project – Making Old Objects Valuable Again (ERC-2022-StG #101075828), the research question is implemented for MOOVA’s focus areas, which concern the Belgian, British, French, Italian and Dutch antiques markets.

After providing for a working definition of low-end, ordinary antiques, the paper will outline and briefly describe the antiques platforms currently active online in the markets of interest for MOOVA. Then, the Business Model Canvas (Oosterwalder, 2004) will be operationalised and employed to classify the relevant information retrieved from the platforms’ websites within specific variables, which will be utilised to compute a cluster analysis of the aforementioned platforms in the dataset. This algorithmic tool will be employed with the purpose of proposing a typology of business models and strategies that are currently being employed in this end of the market, and critically assess them later. This type of classification is not only useful to compare business practices for ordinary antiques to the most known models active at the highest ends of the market, but also and especially as a starting point to explore valuation its potential economic sustainability in the future.

All in all, this research will uncover business paradigms which, although applied to the ordinary antiques market, will offer a new lens through which similar markets could be approached.