The symposium “All the Beauty of the World. The Western Market for non-European Artefacts (18th-20th century)” aimed to interrogate the mechanisms of circulation of artefacts from their countries of origin to the West and their problematic commodification. The first full conference day started with a welcome by its convenors Bénédicte Savoy, Charlotte Guichard and Christine Howald. In the following introduction Guichard and Savoy presented the key issues of the symposium: the scales of the markets from local to global, the embeddedness of art markets within larger political and cultural contexts, the entangled histories of museums and art markets as well as the impact of war on dealing and marketing non-European artifacts.
Welcome Note by Bénédicte Savoy, Charlotte Guichard and Christine Howald