Enfilade

In the latest issue of the Oxford Art Journal:

Oxford Art Journal 47.1 (March 2024), published June 2024.

a r t i c l e s

• Matthew C. Hunter and Avigail Moss, “Art and the Actuarial Imagination: Propositions,” pp. 1–12.
Noting insurance’s importance will hardly come as a surprise to curators, artists, conservators, and others concerned with current practices of exhibiting art. “Art insurance,” as one commentator observes, “is huge business and not least now that artworks move around the world in far greater volume and frequency than ever before.”⁶ Similarly, insurance and its extensive profiteering—from the trade in enslaved peoples to its biopolitical work in capitalist modernity—have been powerfully thematised by Cameron Rowland, Rana Hamadeh, and numerous other contemporary artists (Fig. 1).⁷ Yet, academic art history has been conspicuously slow to reckon with insurance’s force, functions, and fictions. This special issue is meant less as a reprimand for that blind spot than as a prompt to disciplined conversation. Drawing primarily upon the archive of European and North American art practices from the eighteenth century to the present, we mean to agitate for greater attention to how, when, where, and why insurance has come to penetrate art’s making, moving, showing, selling, storing, and being.

• Nina Dubin, “‘Infidelity, Imposture, and Bad Faith’: Reproducing an Insurance Bubble,” pp. 13–37.
When Grayson Perry commemorated the 2008 financial crisis with an etching titled Animal Spirit, he participated in a longstanding tradition of deploying printed images to satirize and demystify a boom-and-bust economy. More specifically, his print recalls a wave of caricatures that circulated in 1720 amidst a pan-European crash: one precipitated by a bubble in hypothetical commodities, foremost among them shares in joint-stock insurance companies. Produced by a group of Amsterdam-based artists including Bernard Picart, such engravings catered to a public that, already in 1720, viewed the business of insurance as occupying the vanguard of an inscrutable financial culture. Not only do these works exemplify early modern artistic efforts to translate into visual form the abstractions of an increasingly financialized economy. They also critically engage with the insurance operations of print, at a time when engraved reproductions presented themselves as policies that safeguarded works of art from the risks of accident and loss.

• Matthew C. Hunter, “The Sun Is God: Turner, Angerstein, and Insurance,” pp. 39–65.
J. M. W. Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon Coming On (also known as The Slave Ship) is probably the iconic visualization of insurance logic in Western art. Exhibited in 1840, the painting has come to be taken as a meditation on the jettison of one hundred thirty three captives from the slave ship Zong off Jamaica in late 1781, murders notoriously claimed as insurable losses from the ship’s underwriters. Less noted is the pervasive presence of insurance within Turner’s practice and milieu. This article follows the tandem of Turner and John Julius Angerstein (1735–1823), a leading underwriter at Lloyd’s of London and an early patron. It places them within a world of artists’ organizations being remade as political instruments by embracing life insurers’ actuarial tables. It traces the pair into the National Gallery (originally housed in Angerstein’s home) as Turner willed his art to the institution, contingent on the purchase of fire insurance. Revisiting The Slave Ship through this skein of underwriting activity, the article posits the Turner/Angerstein coupling as an instructive moment in insurance’s penetration through the thick of artistic practice.

• Richard Taws, “Charles Meryon’s Graphic Risks,” pp. 67–94.
This article considers the place of risk and fictitious value in the work of French printmaker Charles Meryon. Meryon is best-known for the Eaux-fortes sur Paris, the vertiginous etchings of the city he made between 1850 and 1854. Yet despite his close association with the metropolis, Meryon’s visual world was not limited to the French capital. Previously a sailor, he had travelled widely, notably to the South Pacific, to protect speculative whaling interests in New Zealand. At the peak of his career, in 1855, Meryon designed share certificates for an unrealised Franco-Californian property development company, whose owners commissioned from Meryon a panorama of San Francisco. Meryon’s certificate prints have not been discussed at length in the literature on the artist. In the years following the 1848 Revolution, thousands of French workers emigrated to California, and Meryon’s famous etchings of Paris were made against the backdrop of contemporary enthusiasm for the California Gold Rush; these phenomena should, I suggest, be understood together. Focusing on Meryon’s connections to construction and extraction schemes, lotteries, mass emigration, and insurance, this paper reorients analysis of Meryon’s work away from Paris towards more transnational, transatlantic networks of people and things. Reviewing Meryon’s practice in the light of these works, I argue that they illuminate an actuarial imagination at work.

• Ross Barrett, “Sculpting the ‘Idea of Insurance’: John Quincy Adams Ward’s Protection Group and the Rise of the American Life Sector,” pp. 95–115.
This essay examines John Quincy Adams Ward’s Protection Group (1871), a now-lost sculpture that ornamented the original New York headquarters of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, as a complex cultural response to the array of public relations problems that its patron and the broader life insurance sector faced in the decades after the Civil War. Adopted as a company logo at the very moment that the Equitable took steps to expand its insurance portfolio and extend the geographic range of its operations, the Protection Group outlined an imaginative allegory of indemnification that explained the benefits of the company’s policies, popularized actuarial conceptions of status, risk, and uncertainty, and set the terms for a wave of cultural promotions and rebranding efforts that would be undertaken by American life companies in the decades that followed. Tracing the work that the Protection Group did to smooth the way for the Equitable’s development into a multinational insurer and inure turn-of-the century consumers to the financial products and risk sensibilities of the life sector, this essay sheds new light on the pivotal contributions that academic sculptors made to the development of the modern US life insurance industry.

• Avigail Moss, “Ars Longa,Vita Brevis: The Fine Art & General Insurance Company, Ltd,” pp. 117–40.
In late-nineteenth-century Britain, artworks circulated widely between exhibitions, institutions, and marketplaces, increasing the risks of destruction and loss. Administrators, artists, and collectors offset these risks by turning to a key incidental service in capitalism: insurance. But how did artworks and artifacts test insurance underwriters’ capacities? And how did the insurance world impact the art world? This article introduces the Fine Art & General Insurance Company, Ltd, a firm established in London in 1890. As a unique collaboration between art workers and powerful City merchants and underwriters, the company operated for nearly a century, insuring works that travelled to international and domestic expositions, and underwriting collections like the National Gallery’s Chantrey Bequest. With branches and agents stationed in global metropoles, and with ties to the broader British imperium, the company was a key, if inconspicuous, power broker and proxy on the global cultural stage. As an economic and aesthetic gatekeeper, the company also adjudicated on the artworks it perceived to be acceptable risks, and I argue that by analysing its early activities we gain insight into the ways that art insurance—an inherently collective and even speculative activity—was already affecting art’s ecosystems before the twentieth century.

• Sophie Cras, “Art and Insurance after the Era of Statistics,” pp. 141–57.
This article focuses on two artworks made in 2010 by two French artists of different generations: Christian Boltanski’s The Life of C.B. and Julien Prévieux’s Les connus connus, les inconnus connus et les inconnus inconnus. Both resulted from the collaboration between the artist and an actuary-mathematician, at a time when the theoretical, technical and professional assumptions about statistics-based insurance were deeply shaken by the emergence of so-called ‘big data’ and ‘global catastrophic risks’. This vacillation is perceptible in the artists’ choices to represent—and make use of—quantitative, actuarial knowledge. Boltanksi’s video work stages the transformations of life insurance under the data deluge produced by connected technologies of ‘quantified self’. Prévieux’s sound installation displays the techniques of prospective actuarial imagination, when experts mix fact and fiction so as to quantify global catastrophic risks that exceed our capacities to foresight. Therefore, instead of showcasing the implacable efficiency of data-driven technologies, both artists humorously emphasize their inadequacy in the chain of knowledge, prediction, and action.

b o o k  r e v i e w s

• Arie Hartog, “Viewing Broken Things: Review of Stacy Boldrick, Iconoclasm and the Museum (Routledge, 2020),” pp. 159–62.
• Ty Vanover — The Spectacle of Crime: Review of Frederic Schwartz, The Culture of the Case: Madness, Crime, and Justice in Modern German Art (The MIT Press, 2023),” pp. 162–66.
• Jennifer Sichel — A Feminist Queering: Review of Julia Bryan-Wilson, Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (Yale University Press, 2023),” pp. 166–68.

Abstracts
Notes on Contributors