ASSEMBLING ART, CONSTRUCTING HERITAGE

Helen Rees Leahy

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2009, vol. 2, issue 1-2, 135-149

Abstract: On 27 August 2008, the National Galleries in Edinburgh and London launched a campaign to raise £50 million in order to purchase jointly a painting by Titian that had been hanging in the Edinburgh gallery since 1945. The painting, Diana and Actaeon (1556--1559) was one of the ‘Sutherland pictures’: a collection of 29 paintings on loan from the Dukes of Sutherland that had formed the core of the gallery's old master displays for 63 years. The complex nexus of aesthetic, cultural, financial and political issues raised by this very public sale of private property provides a starting point for this paper which aims both to identify the entangled relationships forged between artworks, individuals and institutions through which both market and cultural value are produced. The aim of this paper is to analyse the 2008 sale of Diana and Actaeon in terms of an interaction, rather than an antipathy, between cultural and economic practices. Following Callon's lead, the paper explores how the commoditization of the work of art involves its disentanglement from the numerous relationships and interdependencies in which it is enmeshed so that its market exchange becomes possible (Callon 1998). However, the underlying frame that makes the exchange possible can never be hermetically sealed: the ‘outside world’ of relationships and interdependencies is always present giving rise to ‘overflows’. Callon's concept of ‘overflow’ from the commoditization of the artwork also seeps into what Bruno Latour has described as the ‘catchment’ (or trajectory) of a painting's journey through time and space. The trajectory of Diana and Acteaon provides a vivid illustration of a complex catchment acquired over 350 years and, specifically, how its commoditization first in 1798 and again in 2008 can be viewed through the lens of Callon's perspective of disentanglement and re-entanglement.

Date: 2009
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DOI: 10.1080/17530350903064154

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