Securities of art. Authentication as an artistic concept in times of financial crisis 1720-2020

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Tobias Vogt
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 514731806

In the wake of advancing digitalized and globalized information technologies, the use of authentication has garnered considerable attention – not only in the fields of economics and law, but in the visual arts as well. This research project is the first to examine artistically conceived certificates and contracts, which emerged as a means of authentication that became constitutive for the status and value of artworks from the early 18th century onwards as a result of intensified capitalist and colonial trade relations. The guiding assumption is that artists in particular have reflected on these specific authentication procedures and integrated them into the structure of their works. The project addresses two central issues: first, the question of an art history of authentication in an overall social and finance-historical context; and second, the question of how authentication is conceptualized between the accessory and the work. It takes both a historical and a theoretical approach to exploring a phenomenon which has so far been only marginally and sporadically studied, and only in particular cases, but which is currently coming to the attention of a broader public in the form of digital certification practices for reproduced works of art. The hypothesis is that authentications emerge as artistically conceived entities in particular when prevailing value structures in finance undergo radical transformation. The goal is to reconstruct how these authentications have taken on the role of “Securities of art” over five critical periods between 1720 and 2020, and how they not only react to these crises, but also act as a commentary, critique, or even corrective. This is what the project aims to demonstrate by examining subscription tickets and related prints in London around 1720, caricatures and trompe-l'œils of paper money during the French Revolution era, artistically informed bonds in the Golden Twenties, authentications in New York Conceptual Art, and certificates and contracts in contemporary installations. The backdrop is thus a finance-historical spectrum ranging from the burst “South Sea Bubble” – an early speculative crisis caused by transatlantic trade in enslaved people – to the global and at the same time digital markets of the present day. The project is divided into two parts, which are intertwined in such a way as to give a different weight to art-historical constellations and art-theoretical analyses in each case. The central research questions thus address both the intertwining of art history with the history of finance and a reframing of the idea of the “work” beyond the concepts of “parergon” and “paratext” in order to analyze the shift from the authentication of art to authentication as art asserted here from two different perspectives, the historical and the theoretical.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants