Corporate Collecting in the Worlds of Arts, Business and Cultural Heritage

Corporate art collections have been initiated and curated since the 1950s in the US, Europe, and elsewhere with the aim of promoting cultural participation, stimulating creative thinking, improving brand image, and expressing corporate cultural responsibility by supporting artists and the art world. Yet while corporate collections make up an important part of the international art world, their position, significance and agency within this realm are rarely considered from a transnational point of view.

Corporate Collecting presents the results of an interdisciplinary project in which methodologies from economics, the humanities and sociology are applied in order to understand the impact of corporate collecting. This edited volume contains contributions from a broad range of countries, from East and West, and considers the roles of various stakeholders – employees, managers, artists, curators, and national governments – that help us to understand the essentially hybrid character of corporate art collecting. In doing so, this book opens up new interdisciplinary research avenues, revealing how this fundamentally global phenomenon is characterized by interactions at local level between the artistic, economic, managerial and heritage domains.