Enfilade

From ArtHist.net:

Recycling Luxury
Christie’s Education, 42 Portland Place, London, 5 July 2019

Organized by Jacqui Ansell and Marie Tavinor

The concept of luxury is associated with ideas of excess (luxus) or even worse immodesty (luxure). An infamous example involving Cleopatra dissolving a priceless pearl and swallowing it encapsulates some common associations between luxury and immorality, or luxury as intrinsically linked to the idea of waste. The Christie’s Education Recycling Luxury Conference intends to go beyond the common connotations attached to the concept of luxury, and challenge them. It will posit that luxury cannot be seen entirely in the light of dissipation. Rather it will explore the links between luxury and the idea of recycling i.e. the re-using, repurposing, remaking, reshaping of luxury materials and objects across time and place, hence giving more space for discussion to this understudied historical phenomenon.

Designed to coincide with Classic Week at Christie’s London, the conference is organised by Jacqui Ansell and Dr. Marie Tavinor. To attend, please register here.

P R O G R A M M E

9.15  Coffee and registration

9.45  Welcome

10.00  Panel 1: The Circular Economy
• Sarah Fergusson (McTear’s Auctioneers), The Virtue of Auction Houses
• Levi Higgs and Dianne Batista (David Webb Archives), Lady’s Own Stones: Refashioning Gems of Yesterday into Jewels of Today
• Joy McCall (Christie’s), Re-appropriate in the Making of Late 20th-Century Furniture

11.00  Panel 2: Thrifty Opulence
• Isabella Campagnol (Istituto Marangoni), ‘Broken and Useless’: Notes on Fashion and Textile Recycling and Repurposing in 18th-Century Venice
• Jennifer Halton (Imperial College), Luxury as Spectacle: Making Festivals in Early Modern Florence
• Rosamund Weatherall (National Trust), Re-birth: The Spangled Bed from Knole
• Rachel Perry (University of Haifa), Rags to Riches: Jean Dubuffet’s Rehabilitiation of Mud

12.15  Discussion

12.30  Lunch break

13.30  Panel 3: Symbolic (Re-)Appropriation
• Ian Cockburn (Independent Scholar), Crossing Religious Boundaries: Luxury Islamic Silks and Ivories from al-Andalus
• Susan Jaques (Author and Journalist), ‘This Heavy Thing’: Catherine the Great’s Coronation Crown
• Uta Coburger (State Palaces and Gardens of Baden-Wuerttemberg), Pretty in Pink: The Re-Use of Mannheim Court Fashion by the Jesuits in the 18th Century

14.30  Panel 4: Provenance as a form of Recycling?
• Diana Davis (Independent Researcher), Recycled, Redecorated, Renewed: A Porcelain Inkstand by Edward Holmes Baldock
• Isabelle Cartier-Stone (Christie’s), The Rothschilds and Renaissance Jewellery
• Gil Darby (Independent Scholar), Pearls and La Peregrina

15.20  Discussion

15.40  Tea

16.00  Panel 5: The Afterlife of Luxury
• Pascal Bertrand (Université Bordeaux Montaigne), The Case Study of a ‘Tinkered’ Tapestry
• Catrin Jones (Holburne Museum), ‘Aux Plaisirs des Dames’: A Meissen Bourdaloue Transformed
• Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth (V&A / University of Leeds), Is a Vase Really a Vase When It Used to Be a Chamberpot?
• Joseph Robson (Christie’s), Italian Archeological Jewellery: From Antiquity to the Antiquarian
• Benjamin Wild (Independent Scholar), Liminal Luxury: The Cost and Value of Fancy Dress Costume

17.15  Discussion

17:35  Closing remarks by Jonathan Faiers (University of Southampton)

17:45  Wine reception