Lecture: Collecting Contemporary Art: Data Visualization in Qualitative Research, by Dr. Anne Luther
When: 15 May 2017, 18h15
Where: Room A 111, Architecture Building of the TU, Straße des 17. Juni 150/152, 10623 Berlin.
The event is part of a series of lectures organised by FOKUM: Forum Kunst und Markt / Centre for Art Market Studies
Collecting Contemporary Art: Data Visualization in Qualitative ResearchThe lecture presents Anne Luther’s PhD research, a cultural analysis of today’s art market in New York that takes into account the overarching trends in contemporary art collecting and art production. The study was conducted by Luther in New York between 2013 and 2015. Rather than looking at economic quantities of the market, Luther participated actively in the contemporary art world and collected a vast amount of qualitative data, which in this case were interviews with artists, curators, gallerists, critics and collectors, and additionally participant observation and research diaries. The qualitative dimension of the data represents the “social world” that surrounds collecting and collections of contemporary art. With these deductions, Luther illustrates a visual network of entities that overlap between art production and collecting practices, leading to a theoretical understanding of complexities within the international art world. The data visualization is based on software that Luther developed in 2014 at the Parsons Institute for Information Mapping (today Center for Data Arts) at the New School in New York City. The software is an interactive web tool that visualizes qualitative data analysis. |
Dr. Anne LutherAnne Luther is a researcher, art manager and software developer whose work examines the contemporary art market and data visualization in qualitative research. She received her PhD from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London in 2016 and is currently a researcher at the Department for Modern Art History at the Institute of Art History and Historical Urban Studies at TU Berlin. Between 2015 and 2017 she established a lab for qualitative data visualization at The Center for Data Arts at The New School in New York City and assisted Professor Boris Groys at NYU from 2014 to 2017. Her research is grounded in cultural studies, ethnography and art theory. Luther worked in several art institutions including MoMA PS1, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, HKW Berlin and the art advisory Front Desk Apparatus in New York. |