Better than Gold: Art in Storage and the Making of Financial Value

This interdisciplinary research project studies new types art-storage-spaces and their implications for global relations between art and finance. Today, artworks are increasingly insured, collateralised, and securitised in and through storage. This affects public and private practices of ownership and display, speculation and risk, as well as (self-) regulation and taxation.

Researching how art is currently financialised in and through new types of storage, this interdisciplinary project is the first to analyse the far-reaching implications of such emergent art-storage-spaces. Doing multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork at and around art-storage-spaces, the project studies utilising participant observation and qualitative interviewing the contested technologies, politics, and ethics of art-storage and art-financialization practices.