Broadside
Art Research for our Revolutionary Times.
Art Research is no longer a static process bound to printers, librarians, archivists, and auctioneers.
Computer technology and the Internet have revolutionized the battleground on which art researchers wage their campaigns. This dramatic paradigm shift has provided access and searchability to even the most obscure content in the remotest corners of the planet.
Email allows communication in a flash. Blogs are the stuff of speakers corners and old school letter writers. The venerable broadsides come in the form of flash pages and tweets. The slowly built discourse communities of the artistic, scientific, and literary communities of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries have developed to include web sites, linked in pages, and online journals.
Transparency was the buzz word in the earliest stages of this transition. The histories of prices at which art had traded at auction were a difficult terrain of closely held information. The online publication of auction house records pulled back the curtains and allowed collectors to anonymously trace and track artwork’s movements. Auction record database management pioneered by men like Duncan Hislop and Roger Dunbier allowed historical prices to be gathered iand made searchable.
The catalogue raisonne process, the inventorying of an artist’s complete works, has also been impacted. We now see online projects using a starter base of artworks to be endlessly amended as new artworks appear. The new format fits the Procrustean world of art, as pieces are discovered and attributions changed.
Art Broadside celebrates the unprecedented ability to communicate globally with the art community, to cordially exchange information about art, and to resurrect the forgotten artist.
A review of the hammer prices realized at auction confirm that art is ever prized and artistic genius coveted by the men and women who have the financial wherewithal to wage battle in the auction rooms.
To the New Age of Art Research!
Mary Anna Webb
