Search results

I have not read all the tributes that have been made to John Hume since his death in 2020, but I doubt if many—perhaps any—of them have got to the heart of his real achievement, which was twofold. On the one hand, he prevented a settlement of Northern Ireland’s constitutional status that seemed to be a real possibility in the late seventies and early eighties on what might have been called ‘Unionist’ principles (though it could have resulted in the end, or radical decline, of ‘Unionism’ as a force in Northern Ireland politics). On the other hand, along with Gerry Adams, Charles Haughey, and Father Alec Reid of the Clonard monastery in Belfast, he found a means by which the IRA could lay down its arms without the appearance of having been defeated—an appearance of defeat that would have had very damaging consequences for the cultural and political coherence of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland.   It needs to be said straightaway that the IRA were not defeated. Their achievement in maintaining the war and driving their enemies— the British army, with all the resources, both overt and covert, it possessed, together with the array of Ulster Protestant paramilitary forces—to a stalemate is very impressive. Pat Walsh, in Resurgence , his remarkable study of the resurgence of the Catholic community starting in the 1960s, suggests that, even as early as the late 1970s, elements in the IRA leadership had recognised that they could not ‘win’, if ‘winning’ meant ‘securing a united Ireland’.[1] But by that time so much energy, skill, and determination had been invested in the campaign that it had become the emblem of Catholic—especially Catholic working-class—resolve never to return to the near-50 years of humiliation they had suffered since the Westminster government imposed a separate, necessarily Protestant-dominated, government on them. An appearance of defeat would have had a severely demoralising effect on the community as a whole, the more so because so many young people were joining (with all the dangers—and excitement—that that implied), not because of any great longing for a united Ireland, but simply out of outrage at the presence of army soldiers in their streets and army helicopters in their skies.   A disruptive system of government   In the early 1980s, it was possible to believe (I certainly believed) that Northern Ireland was headed, on autopilot so to speak, towards what could have been a stable and permanent settlement. In principle, the political problem had been solved in 1972, with the ‘suspension’ of Stormont. Precisely because of the Catholic/Protestant division, Northern Ireland was the part of the United Kingdom least suitable for the establishment of a devolved government. In Northern Ireland, devolved government could only mean a permanent Unionist (Protestant) majority lording it over a permanent Nationalist (Catholic) minority. This was obviously not what the Catholic minority wanted. But the Catholic position wasn’t a simple matter of Republican sentiment. Catholic Ulster had been a redoubt of the old Home Rule movement against the new, determinedly separatist, Sinn Fein. The leading Ulster Catholic politician, Joseph Devlin, was well connected in Westminster and particularly well placed with regard to the emergence after the First World War of the Labour Party. He had been very much looking forward to continuing his Westminster career under the new circumstances that would have been created by Home Rule (a relatively minor devolution of power analogous to the present arrangements for Scotland and Wales). Even after partition, if Northern Ireland had continued to be governed directly by Westminster he would have made a formidable tribune for the Ulster Catholics. As it was, with effective power in the hands of his lifelong enemies, and all the political parties in Westminster washing their hands of responsibility for the place, it was as if he had the legs cut out from under him.   But nor did the Ulster Unionists want a devolved government for their part of Ireland. When, in May 1920, the Government of Ireland Act came to the House of Lords, the Unionist leader, Sir Edward Carson, abstained and protested powerfully, saying:   It has been said over and over again, ‘you want to oppress the Catholic minority, you want to get a Protestant Ascendancy over there’. We have never asked to govern any Catholic. We are perfectly satisfied that all of them, Protestant and Catholic, should be governed from this Parliament and we have always said that it was the fact that this Parliament was aloof entirely from these racial distinctions and religious distinctions, which was the strongest foundation for the Government of Ulster.[2]

Christopher A Marinello is an expert in recovering stolen, looted, and missing works of art. A lawyer for over 38 years, Marinello began his legal career as a litigator, negotiating complex title disputes between collectors, dealers, museums, and insurance companies. In 2013, he founded Art Recovery Group, a specialist practice providing due diligence, dispute resolution, and recovery services for the art market and the cultural heritage sector. Marinello has overseen the development of the ArtClaim Database, the most technologically advanced system in existence for identifying and recording issues and claims attached to works of art. Marinello has recovered over $400 million of stolen and looted artwork, and has worked on some of the most important recoveries of Nazi-looted art. CJLPA : I thought we could start with a bit about your career. How did you start off as an art lawyer? Christopher Marinello : I started off a while ago at art school, but I wasn’t particularly talented and was encouraged by others to try the law instead—with a law degree you can always go back to painting. So I went to law school and became a litigator, and worked in the courts of New York City for almost 20 years, and I developed my love for keeping my clients. I worked for artists, for galleries, collectors, museums, and whatnot. And then, in around 2013, I founded Arts Recovery International.   CJLPA : How did you come about doing that?   CM : I was working for the Art Loss Register as their General Counsel, and I started in New York and, at their request, moved to London. Then I left to start my own business. Of course, it’s very hard to tell a British businessman how to run their business when you’re an Italian American lawyer.   CJLPA : You’ve worked on the cases of some highly famous works of art. Would it be fair to say that fame and public intrigue around some of the cases you’ve worked on have been impediments to objective investigation?   CM : I don’t think so at all. In fact, some of the high-profile cases I have handled will never be disclosed publicly. The cases that we do disclose are for a reason: either because we are trying to publicly pressure a government or a certain party to resolve the matter in some fashion, or because we are trying to put pressure on the public to tell us the whereabouts of a stolen or looted painting. As lawyers, we do what our clients ask us to do. If they want the publicity we go forward. If not we remain confidential. If clients do decide to go forward publicly, it’s to apply pressure to somebody, or so the public knows that the painting is no longer subject to a title dispute, because they want to sell it or the painting has to be   sold, and they want the art market to feel comfortable that a title dispute has been resolved.

Philip Hoffman is Founder and CEO of the Fine Art Group, which focusses on art advisory, investment, and philanthropy. At 33 he became the youngest member of KPMG’s Management Board and later served as its Deputy CEO of Europe. He also worked for Christie’s for 12 years. He regularly comments on the art market in the international press. The Frick Collection is widely regarded as one of New York’s finest galleries. From the interiors of Vermeer to the forests of Fragonard, any enthusiast, collector or museumgoer would envy its collection. Around 300,000 people visit the collection each year, and in 2019 they saw shows on Giambattista Tiepolo’s Milanese frescoes and on French faience masterpieces.[1] It is easy to forget, though, that the Frick has depended on private collectors since its inception. There would be no Frick Museum without Mr and Mrs Frick, just as there would be no Courtauld Gallery without Samuel Courtauld, and no Kettle’s Yard without Jim and Helen Ede. Museums should remember that private collectors will facilitate their survival in times of trial and tribulation.   In conversation with Philip Hoffman, founder and CEO of the Fine Art Group, this article explores the ways in which the private collector supports the public institution.[2] Hoffman recalls how his clients work with public institutions: they send art around the globe, fund exhibitions, and make gifts to their beloved galleries. Although the idea is counterintuitive, public museums must continue to connect, engage, and communicate with private collectors. Loaning and philanthropy have never been more imperative for ensuring the permanency of our institutions. Collectors and museums are not ‘Romulus and Remus’, as the art world has come to believe. There are, it appears, two spaces on the Capitoline Hill. Our culture benefits from the presence of both collector and institution.   The Fine Art Group manages 140 different collections in 28 countries. From ‘Australia to Chile’ and from ‘New York to London’ its collectors invest in, assemble and donate art. Naturally, some motivations and ambitions are unique to the collector. Personal collections are a store of both monetary and social capital. Moreover, for many, buying art is an investment strategy, since art assets generally rise in value. It is tempting to believe that these objectives go against the public interest. The collector’s ambition to own  seems at odds with the institution’s ambition to exhibit, display, and educate . Private collections seem covert rather than overt, isolated  rather than accessible . Private is consistently considered ‘versus’ the public.   The social life of private collections, however, generally extends into the public realm, since their artworks are loaned and exhibited to the public. ‘We have lent major paintings from our own collections or art investments to museums’, Hoffman notes. Recently, they lent a Canaletto and a Cindy Sherman to shows about their respective artists. Collectors furnish exhibitions with artworks that museums could not afford, and the works they loan are integral to retrospective exhibitions. Collectors, then, participate with and enable public intentions—they facilitate in educating and exhibiting .

The months since my investiture have been remarkable in a number of ways. First and foremost, the continuing pandemic has changed the way my office engages with the public, replacing the in-person contact of what is traditionally a highly social role with virtual gatherings. At the same time, I find myself in a unique position to see and celebrate the innovation and strength with which individuals and organizations are responding to the challenges of the day. My goal, as we move through the pandemic and beyond, is to bring all of my fellow citizens along with me on the journey. I hope to shine a light on the heroes and community leaders who are finding meaningful ways to make life better for others, while honouring the traditions of service and the protection of democratic principles that stand at the heart of the viceregal role in Canada.   *   Premier Kenney; Chief Justice Fraser; Mr Speaker; Honourable Ministerial Colleagues; Honourable Daniel Vandal, Minister of Northern Affairs; Members of the Legislative Assembly; British Consul General Carolyn Saunders; Elder Cecil Crier and Indigenous Leaders; Members of the Judiciary; Mr Alain Laurencelle, Chancellor of the Order of St John; distinguished guests; my fellow Albertans; friends and my dear family:   I regret that most of my close family members are unable to be here today, but hopefully they are able to watch online.   I wish to begin by respectfully acknowledging that we are meeting on Treaty 6 territory and a traditional meeting ground and home for many Indigenous people. We pay our respect to the First nation and Metis ancestors of this place and reaffirm our relationship with them. I thank Elder Cecil Crier for Blessings as I begin this extraordinary journey and I also thank Rocky Morin for the Honour Song he will be so generously offering later today.   C’est un grand honneur pour moi de m’addresser à vous audjourd’hui en tant que representante de l’Alberta de sa Majesté La Reine Elizabeth II.   I am both honoured and humbled to be addressing all of you today. I would like to begin by telling you a little about myself and by sharing how so much of my life has been shaped by a sense of hope.   I grew up in a house full of family in Kampala, Uganda, a beautiful place on the other side of the world. Indeed, there was a time when there were 15 of us living together under the same roof. Extended family and nuclear family were blended together. We didn’t know the difference. We lived, we played, and we prayed together. We were simply family, and family was always close, in every sense of the word.

Mark Cazalet, born 1964, trained at the Chelsea and then Falmouth Schools of Art, after which he held scholarships in Paris and India. He works in a variety of media, including engraved glass, paint, prints, mosaics, and graphic media. He has taught in several art institutions and has been a Senior Member of Faculty at The Royal Drawing School since 2012. Travel has always played an important role in his art. Through the experience of his journeys, he has opened up rich colloquy between contemporary and traditional arts, between classical and folk forms. Architecture, film, fiction, and theology have all played a role in his creative evolution.   Professor Frances Spalding, CBE, FRSL, PhD, the interviewer, is an art historian and biographer. After studying History of Art at the University of Nottingham, she became a specialist in twentieth-century British art. Following the publication of her British Art Since 1900 , in the Thames & Hudson ‘World of Art’ series, she was commissioned by the Tate to write its centenary history. She has also produced five biographies of artists as well as one on the poet Stevie Smith. She taught at Newcastle University 2000-15, becoming Professor of Art History. In 2014 she guest-curated the exhibition ‘Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision’ for the National Portrait Gallery. During the year 2015-6 she acted as Editor of The Burlington Magazine and became a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge.   This conversation took place at Clare Hall, Cambridge, on 25 February 2021.   Professor Frances Spalding: Our guest this evening is Mark Cazalet. Mark is an artist who has pursued a very wide-ranging career. He could be described as a latter-day John Piper, for, like Piper, he has worked in a variety of media, received major public commissions, has a strong sense of place and has travelled widely. Both Piper and Cazalet remind me of Beethoven’s remark, ‘Art demands of us that we do not stand still’, a challenging statement that refers to much more than travel. Travel, however, is something which many of us have greatly missed during the COVID crisis. Some years back I heard a speaker at a conference in Cambridge say, ‘The most radical thing you can do today is to stay at home’. This was with reference to ecology, but today we understand this command in relation to COVID, as well as in relation to our carbon footprint. Yet the fact that a common swift can stay in the air for ten months without touching ground shows how innate within the natural world, including within us, is the need to move, to migrate, to travel. Friedrich Nietzsche advised, ‘Never trust a thought that didn’t come by walking’. And I want to suggest that the current interest in reviving a habit that began seven hundred years ago, namely that of pilgrimage, is further evidence of our need to locate ourselves in place and time, and to realise that remembrance is key to the continuing of life.   This evening Mark Cazalet will deliver a presentation on his work and travels, and the understanding he has gained from the latter. So, over to you, Mark.   Mark Cazalet : Frances wrote the first important essay on my work back in 1994, and since then has put her finger on the pressure points in my work, consistently, sparingly but fiercely. This opportunity to present the role that travel has had in my work has made me aware that my creativity has been subject to two forces: a centrifugal force, and a gravitational force. Since the seventies, the opportunity to propel ourselves out into the far corners of the world has been an exciting liberation. But it has come at a cost. I think we are now beginning to ask ourselves why we are travelling such big distances. What do we really learn from these travels? And how might—in this present time and after the pandemic—our notions of  significant  travel change? That is what I call the gravitational aspect—what matters to us here and now and within our environment, and which calls on our need to stay still, the alternative to travel.   Because I will start by showing you some of my early work, which I’m frankly terrified to see again, I thought I’d jump ahead in this first slide to a recent work from my Kyoto Zen gardens series which I’m pleased with and excited by (fig 1). But I want to compare it with work from my degree show (such as fig 2). The comparison makes me aware that, as an artist, you don’t travel forward in a linear way, but are endlessly bumping into old iterations of yourself. With creative work you travel cyclically. Things you thought you had dealt with come up again. While studying at Falmouth, in Cornwall, I imagined myself as another Peter Lanyon, in a glider, flying over the countryside and becoming a Cornish abstract painter. As so often happens on long journeys, you end up doing the very opposite thing you thought you would do. I ended up as a student hunting in charity shops collecting detritus and creating strange, theatrical, mise-en-scène, dark cityscapes. Fig 1. The stillness the dancing, Kyoto Zen garden collage (Mark Cazalet 2020, collage papers, inks, MT tape, pencils, and oil pastels, 46 x 130cm).

The will to transparency, the scopic drive to see through, to scrutinise naked truth, encounters a significant impediment in the dead letters, the literae mortuae , of law. The puppet show of juridical interpretation, the marionettes that are pulled as heavy signifiers, gothic black-letter dogmas from the pickle jar of precedent, perform a spectacle that is always a trope and costume, a stage and screen away from the viewing subject. As the pop philosopher and ‘narcotheorist’ Laurent de Sutter observes of a prime example of this paradox—the new Palais de Justice, the judicial city and island of law designed by Renzo Piano on the outskirts of Paris entirely in glass façade—it is the opposite of transparent.[1] The intimidating size, the insular location, the monumental aura, and the nomothetic lines of the rectangular structure suggest, at best, a juggernaut of justice. It appears open to the lines of sight but closed and excluding of any miniature mortal who might wish, in some unauthorised fashion, to enter and somehow animate the dead letters or lost epistles of what is to all appearances an instance of vox Dei suprema lex esto . Neither missive nor monumental building was authored in any recognisable manner by the populace.   The megalith that replaces the classical architecture, highly symbolic designs, and artwork of the old Palais on Île de la Cité suggests, in more quotidian terms, a vast office building, an indistinct corporate structure not so dissimilar to a rectangular and stacked version of the World Trade Center. There is nothing legal, no symbol of jurist or justice, in the plain glass façade. The use of windows reverses the traditional windowless spaces of judgement, the subtly in camera character of the courthouse, and suggests the appearance of an interior, a window into the beating heart of legality,  figura fenestris  appearing in law. The glass, however, is more panopticon   and occlusion than it is, in any sensible concept of appearance, likely to be entered by the viewing eye. The passing subject will have their eye deflected to the building as a structure, a scalar manifestation of forensis as a faceless leviathan, a supraterrestrial but blankly uniform   front. The other irony is that if the gaze is focussed beyond the reflections in the panes to pierce the wall of glass, what is visible is primarily a corporate space of passages, corridors, stairs and benches for waiting.[2] The juridical interior is not open to view, and so the eye that penetrates the windows will see only a labyrinth of nondescript open spaces leading inexorably to the closed doors and opaque walls of the inner sancta, the temples of judgement, the hotwired, multiply screened, media-saturated courts. Where earlier legal architecture, replete with columns, classical statuary, and monumental inscriptions in archaic languages, invited attention to the façade, to the appreciation of an illocutionary presence and civic message, a symbolic spectacle of justice and law, the glass façade acts more as a mirror deflecting sight to the presence and size of this particular space station.[3]   The visible leviathan perhaps makes its optical case too vehemently, a hyperbole that often signals decay and demise—but such proleptic prognostications are for other occasions. The paradox to be pursued here is rather the tension between the purported transparency of the exterior, the sense of remediation from stone to glass, and the visually desipient opacity of the interior. An installation of the juridical in the remediated form of a monumental, quadripartite glass structure creates an impermeable visibility, a faceless mausoleum of legal acts that effectuates the trompe-l’œil of being a window into invisible proceedings. The trick and trope of the design is to create the appearance of transparency, the illusion of exposure of the physical presence and public accessibility of the juridical, to make it ordinary, popular, recognisably corporate, while creating a site on the periphery of the city that discourages both viewing and visiting. The apparent is never simply appearance, and to look into is also always a matter of looking away, of noticing and of overlooking, as the expression goes. Law is no different in its scopic choices, its rules of seeing, as also in its blindspots and scotomising aspects.   Scopic desires   Juridical optical desire, by which I mean no more than the institutional regulation of appearance and disappearance, and most specifically, the rules that control looking and being viewed, is strictly regulated. When cameras were allowed for the first time into a terrorist trial in the new Palais, they were prohibited from filming anyone other than the speakers.[4] The lens was blinkered, the images were to be restricted to the orators and the dialogue. Discourse governed sight. Filming in the UK Supreme Court has similar rules, and static cameras that relay bench and advocates. At common law, the regimen of lines of sight, spaces of audition, and optical scrutiny is surprisingly limited, as also are the means of looking, the lenses, ocular and artificial, that are permitted and those that are forbidden. This dates back to section 41 of the Criminal Evidence Act 1925, which makes it an offence to ‘take or attempt to take in any court any photograph, or with a view to publication make or attempt to make in any court any portrait or sketch, of any person’ participating in the proceedings. This statute against visual representation of parties was pitched against the social media of the era, the so-called ‘yellow press’, the legislation responding most directly to popular criticism of a death penalty decision and the wide circulation of a photograph of the judge, a black cloth over his bewigged head.[5] Thenceforth, the tableau vivant  of judicial determinations could only be seen in the minimalist sense of attending the trial, and the viewing cannot be shown to the public in any other form of direct visual reportage. A variety of later criminal laws of procedure further restrain the modes of viewing and relaying proceedings.

Camilla Perera-de Wit is the Secretary-General and Director-General of the Netherlands Arbitration Institute (NAI). Her previous experience in dispute resolution includes her work at the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) and at P.R.I.M.E. Finance. She is a board member of the Court for Arbitration of Art (CAfA) in Rotterdam.   Bert Demarsin is a law professor at KU Leuven, who has conducted extensive work on art disputes. His work particularly focuses on provenance and authenticity disputes. He is also a board member of CAfA.   Elliot Wright spoke in December 2020 with two of CAfA’s board members, Camilla Perera-de Wit and Bert Demarsin. We spoke about the nature and current state of art law, including difficulties in recent years, and the role CAfA can play in this field, as well as arbitration more generally.   Art law   Demarsin started by explaining that ‘there are actually four big fields within art and cultural heritage law’. First, art has to be created—so there can be issues with attribution and copyright. Second, art has to be preserved—this is not so true for contemporary art perhaps, but for cultural heritage there are a whole host of regulations, for instance on whether it can be exported or on how it should be restored or preserved. Third, circulation, which Demarsin describes as being the basis of the art business. This field covers auctions, authenticity, theft, and smuggling and other issues relating to the movement of art. Fourth, and finally, is the field Demarsin calls valorisation—which is how one can take advantage of one’s ownership of art, and realise its value through exhibitions or merchandising, and the conflicts that might arise from this.   Whilst conflicts can, and do, arise in all these areas, most arise in respect of circulation, as this is where the business of art trading is carried out. The vast capital in this market means disputes are more likely to arise from any disagreement, and the number of transactions means disagreements are not uncommon. There are also circulation issues in respect of restitution of art, and questions of looted art and cultural heritage. Even now there are cases arising from asserting ownership of art which was unlawfully confiscated in the Second World War, as well as ongoing disputes in relation to cultural heritage such as that surrounding the Elgin Marbles, and more recent debates on the restitution of colonial heritage. Here, Demarsin refers to his native Belgium’s colony in the Congo, but of course other European states, such as the UK, similarly seized art in that period. These are the disputes which feature more prominently in the public press, and therefore also the public conscience more generally, but for art dealers authentication is a more common and important problem.   Perera-de Wit then spoke about some of the features of art law which present unique challenges in dispute resolution. Speaking from her experience in dispute resolution, including at the Permanent Court for Arbitration (PCA) and at P.R.I.M.E. Finance, she pointed to the increasing complexity and globalisation of disputes, including in the art world. In the art world, parties are increasingly likely to be based in different jurisdictions, and traceable agreements documenting the transactions are not always in place. Where disputes arise, they can be technical in nature. They benefit from specialist legal knowledge as well as expert factual analysis. That expertise is not always readily available in the local courts, which makes alternative dispute resolution an attractive option in the art world. This also led to the founding of CAfA, to prevent such disputes being resolved by what could be ‘a roll of the dice’, as Perera-de Wit put it, as to whether the dispute was resolved in a time-efficient manner with an outcome that the markets can rely upon.

Count Sperello di Serego Alighieri is an astronomer descended from Dante Alighieri, author of the  Divine Comedy .   Antoine de Gabrielli is a prominent French businessman descended from Cante dei Gabrielli, the judge who condemned Dante to exile.   Dante Alighieri lived from 1265 to 1321. During his lifetime, he was a pharmacist, a poet, and a politician. His study of medicines nourished an already scientific mind and allowed him to stock pharmacy shelves with his works. (Books were sold in pharmacies at the time). Dante’s work as a poet led to the  Divine Comedy , among other masterpieces. The  Comedy is regarded as one of the greatest works of Western literature and the most significant in the Italian language. Dante’s time as a politician, however, led to his undoing. He became embroiled in the fractious Guelph–Ghibelline rifts of fourteenth-century Florence. Whilst he was being held by the Pope in Rome on false pretences, Dante’s native Florence was taken by a hostile element within his own faction, the Guelphs. There he was tried in absentia on two politically motivated charges of corruption. Cante dei Gabrielli, the mercenary captain, a master of political manoeuvres and ad hoc judge, found Dante guilty on both charges, sentencing him to exile for life. If Dante were ever to return to Florence, he would be executed. Dante never returned. He died in Ravenna, where his body remains—much to the dismay of successive generations of politicians in Florence. This year is the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. To mark this anniversary, a leading Italian lawyer, Alessandro Traversi, is holding a retrial, revisiting the events of 1302 to reassess the validity of these convictions, both as a matter of law and principle. The most direct descendants of the affronted Dante Alighieri and the judge who condemned him, Cante dei Gabrielli, are Count Sperello Alighieri and Antoine de Gabrielli. They will both be present at this trial. Count Alighieri is today one of Italy’s most celebrated astronomers. de Gabrielli is a prominent French businessman—in an amusing irony, the dei Gabrielli family, generations after exiling Dante to another Italian state, themselves fled Italy altogether and moved to France, modifying their name accordingly.   This retrial raises important points of law and justice and marks a poignant moment in the seven-centuries-long lifetime of a perceived wrong. Count Alighieri and de Gabrielli have more to say.   *   CJLPA : What exactly are the nature and purpose of this ‘retrial’? Has it been portrayed accurately by journalists around the world?   Count Sperello Alighieri : This ‘retrial’ is, for me, an amusement. It is not a formal legal process nor an officially sanctioned public inquiry. I do not see it as anything serious, simply an interesting event that will help preserve the memory of Dante. The original trial occurred long ago. Whilst it is true that very few descendants of Dante ever returned to Florence (in fact, I only went there for the first time a few years ago), this is not part of a deliberate attempt to avoid the place—there was simply no occasion for us to visit! The Alighieri family have long stopped feeling the injustice of the 1302 trial.   Traversi, the lawyer who proposed the 2021 retrial, falsely claimed to the international press that I had initiated these proceedings. It was Traversi who initiated them and who invited me to have a role. His untrue claim to the contrary almost led me to resign from my role in the trial. Alarmingly, the British press—in particular, the Times  and Guardian —did not question the Traversi press release   or the scant accounts of the retrial in Italian media. They did not check with me. This has significantly damaged my impression of the British press, as well as the impression held by intellectual circles within Italy of the British press. The Spanish press had the nous to check—the Spanish!

John Dewey Distinguished University Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Elizabeth Anderson is famously redefining egalitarianism in the field of political philosophy. Conventionally, philosophical debate has imagined the two concepts of equality and freedom to be polar opposites. Anderson has sought to challenge this perception by subordinating the popular egalitarian notion of distributive equality to that of democratic equality, which brings the concepts of freedom and equality together. Anderson’s groundbreaking work extends beyond political philosophy and engages in interdisciplinary research across fields and topics such as racial integration, the philosophy of economics, theories of value and rational choice, and the history and philosophy of the work ethic. In this interview, Anderson reveals the importance of empirical analysis within philosophy, what we can learn through an analysis of the history of egalitarianism and the role of social movements within its discourse, and how present inequalities have come about.   CJLPA : Could you perhaps tell us a bit about your trajectory to becoming a philosopher?   Professor Elizabeth Anderson : I started off in college studying economics, but there I noticed issues that I had at a very foundational level. These were questions like: should we assume that preferences are all in the person’s self-interest? We often choose to observe social norms: for example, out of norms of etiquette, you don’t take the last roll in the basket. But if the host offers it to you, you would prefer that to not having it. I thought economics wasn’t sorting out the distinctions well, and that was leading to mistakes in welfare economics. If people are declining to do things just out of social norms, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their welfare is being advanced, even though they’re doing what they want in the sense that they are choosing to do it. Such foundational questions moved me into philosophy, because philosophers want to put pressure on concepts that are used in the social sciences that maybe haven’t been probed adequately, and to think about introducing other ideas that could call into question some of the normative conclusions that people are drawing from their social scientific research. So that moved me into philosophy, but I have always been engaged in the social sciences. I think economics would be enriched if it drew distinctions that better tracked normatively important ideas.   CJLPA : Your current research interest is in the history of egalitarianism. What was your motivation behind this recent research interest?   EA : If you look in contemporary political philosophy, you see that much is written about freedom, and what freedom means, and why it is important. Equality is there, but I found it to be under-theorised. In particular, there’s the dominance of a certain distributive notion of equality that is kind of cosmic, which I think makes no sense. It applies to situations like this: imagine there is a distant world out there with beings just like us, only they have half the welfare levels that we do. Some conclude that there would be this unfairness in the universe because there’s an inequality. I think this notion of inequality has nothing to do with the inequality that people care about in real society. What people care about is not just some abstract difference between what I have and what you have. It’s all about social relations and social processes. How did those rich people get all that money? Did they get it at others’ expense? And are they using that wealth to dominate others? Does society turn wealth disparities into grounds for stigmatising the less advantaged? If it’s just some cosmic inequality with some distant planet, there’s no causal connection between our well-being and their well-being, and there is no injustice in that.

William Christie is an American-born French conductor and harpsichordist. He read History of Art at Harvard and then Music at Yale, where he specialised in the baroque repertoire. Opposed to the Vietnam war, he moved to France in 1970 and pioneered the renewal of French baroque music by creating his musical ensemble Les Arts Florissants in 1979. Since 1985, he has lived in his seventeenth-century manor in Thiré (Vendée) which hosts a yearly festival of baroque music, Les Jardins de William Christie. A gifted pedagogue, in 2002 he founded the Jardin des Voix, a biennially-run academy for young singers, and he regularly teaches at the Juilliard School and the Conservatoire National Supérieur in Paris.   Claire Roserot de Melin is General Manager of the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse in France. She previously worked as an artistic coordination director, at the Opera of Rouen and for various companies and ensembles. She used to be an oboist.   CJLPA : What is the current situation for the music industry? What sorts of scheme exist to protect musicians in these troubled times?   Claire Roserot de Melin : There are two dimensions to the issue of musicians’ social protections in this crisis. Even though some gaps in social protection remain, musicians have been better protected in France than anywhere else. Firstly, the existing system of intermittents du spectacle  has enabled artists to get social benefits as any other employees. Paid for by employers and workers’ contributions, it allows performing artists to claim benefits for the fallow periods between intermittent contracts, as long as they have worked for at least 507 hours in ten and a half months. The second aspect is the introduction of an année blanche  which consists of the extension of the intermittents entitlement to social benefits in line with the 2019 fiscal year. This system is relatively effective but it nonetheless excludes intermittent  new entrants and non-national artists. Trade unions and employers are asking for the prolongation of the année blanche  after 31 August, when they are supposed to come to an end, and for more financial support for entities responsible for artists’ day-to-day lives, such as artists’ health support groups, which have been strongly impacted by the loss in revenue. But our main priority remains to reopen concert halls, and we have been in talks with the Ministry of Culture and the Prime Minister for months. Major public cultural institutions such as the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse have a leading role to play in protecting the artistic ecosystem. We have fulfilled every work contract regardless of nationality, and permanent artists have pursued rehearsals and recordings as usual. In contrast, privately funded institutions have been terribly hit, economically, by the closures of concert halls, and some might unfortunately never reopen.   William Christie : I do not think there are such things as schemes but, rather, less ambitious protocols focussing too much on sanitary issues and leaving musicians aside with no prospects. Concert halls, musical venues, and theatres have been closed since March 2020, with the exception of Spain and Monaco in Europe, and musicians have no other option than to play concerts without a public. Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have had more than 100 concerts and six opera productions cancelled, and the future is still very unclear. France has nonetheless been good to us with the system of ‘ chômage partiel ’, but there is a difference between having a normal professional life and one with no prospects. France takes great pride in its culture, l’exception culturelle française , which is used as a political weapon, and its showcase abroad, yet its political significance has eroded domestically since the 2000s, and the time France had visionary culture ministries seems gone.   CJLPA : How would you see the longer-term effects of COVID on the music industry, if any?

Introduction   Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled prediction algorithms create multiple challenges to existing ideas about human agency and how the results of this agency may be governed. Weak or absent transparency in the operation of computational systems is changing the meaning of individual autonomy as AI enables vast numbers of new capabilities previously designed and implemented by humans.[1] The prevailing wisdom is that AI innovation is best driven by commercial market incentives. Investment in refining AI-inspired commercial strategies and techniques that are less and less susceptible to external (and even internal) control or oversight is central to futuristic visions of data-enabled societies. Among the many sectors entangled with AI innovation is the art world.   Hodge SCJ defines AIs as ‘computer systems able to perform tasks which traditionally have required human intelligence or tasks whose completion is beyond human intelligence’.[2] Computational technologies having this ability include machine learning, neural networks and predictive algorithms. When employed to create artefacts perceived as art, the resulting AI-assisted and AI-generated artworks are viewed either as a destabilising threat to the traditional art world or as an opening up of opportunities for new forms of expression. At present, AI art is principally the domain of computer science expertise and its AI component is mainly being driven by incentives in the commercial marketplace.   The agency to produce AI art has been harnessed to a commercial yoke. Is this an inevitable or desirable state of affairs? This paper examines the scope for ensuring that the expansion of AI in the art world does not lead to the enclosure of all these new forms of artworks in the commercial realm. It explores whether and how digitisation and computational advance can help to democratise art, opening rather than enclosing the artistic commons.[3]   The (short) commercial history of AI art   Google used its DeepDream neural network to classify artworks in 2015 and observed the potential for this AI system to be used to remix visual images. When the system was shared feely with artists, experimentation began. This led to a gallery showing of DeepDream-inspired artworks in 2016 at Gray Area, a San Francisco gallery and arts foundation. Artbreeder followed soon after as an open collaborative platform, with users making some 127 million AI-generated works at this writing.   Although computerisation in the artworld was not new, it has been attracting increasing attention. AI art entered the market with a Christie’s sale in 2018 of an AI-assisted portrait of a fictional character, Edmond de Belamy. Obvious, a Paris-based art collective, trained an algorithm to generate the AI artwork, but the algorithm itself had been created by Robbie Barret and downloaded from an open source platform. Initially valued at USD 10k, the artwork was auctioned for USD 432k, a premium achieved by being the first time such an artwork had entered the commercial market. It was created using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)—an AI system that uses neural networks to produce a generator and a discerner image, the former developing new output images and the latter testing these against training data to see if they comply with patterns found in that data. In the de Belamy case, the algorithms were trained on WikiArt repositories of paintings. Obvious made the decisions to select, print and market the image and the company received the proceeds with no payment being made to the developer of the AI system.[4]

Manuel Rabaté is Director of Louvre Abu Dhabi. He has taught Arts & Cultural Management at Paris-Dauphine University and Paris-Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi. He is a Knight of France’s National Order of Merit.   Dr Souraya Noujaim is Scientific, Curatorial & Collections Management Director of Louvre Abu Dhabi. She has studied the British Museum’s Arabic weights and measures, and has been Islamic Art History Chair at the École du Louvre.   Louvre Abu Dhabi sits at a tense but enriching cultural crossroads. The museum brings the name of France’s most treasured cultural institution to the desert of the United Arab Emirates. The museum is innovative but its geopolitical context is difficult: a background of continuous government negotiations, and the cultural friction between East and West. The institution’s Director, Manuel Rabaté, and Curatorial Director, Dr Souraya Noujaim, discussed their creative vision and difficulties with honesty.   CJLPA : Louvre Abu Dhabi arose in 2017 out of a 2007 agreement between France and the UAE. What was the intention behind the agreement?   Manuel Rabaté : This agreement was extraordinarily visionary. You cannot read it in isolation. It was part of a master plan to make Abu Dhabi an important international centre of knowledge, education, sustainability, and tourism. It was made in tandem with other agreements that led to Sorbonne Abu Dhabu, Berkley Abu Dhabi, New York University Abu Dhabi, Zayed University and National Museum, and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Tourism was undoubtedly an important motive. The government of Abu Dhabi was keen to ensure diversification of economic assets, and found that strong investment in its educational and cultural fibre was an excellent way of achieving this. The UAE federation dates only to 1971, but the place has a rich, much older heritage. The UAE wants to preserve this and create a cultural legacy. There is much more there than just the sun.   The community is built on other institutions and ideals too. Many of the buildings in which Abu Dhabi’s cultural institutions sit have been designed by Western architects, and many institutions bear Western names. But they are not necessarily extensions of Western points of view and ways of doing things. A key part of the vision behind Louvre Abu Dhabi, as well as the wider cultural objectives of the Abu Dhabi government, was to promote a universal story. Much like the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris are not museums of British art or French art, Louvre Abu Dhabi is place where you invite the world to come and see how you perceive human interconnectedness. We want to tell the story of the world through artworks and objects of beauty, at the same time raising points about Arab identity and the interaction of East and West. This may sound like a cliché, but I mean it truly.   CJLPA : What are your goals as Director?   MR : My mission as Director can be structured around four pillars, which chime with what my view of what a museum is. First, I want to focus on the building itself and its surroundings. We have an incredible, delicate building on the sea. It is a challenge to maintain, but I take pride in being its custodian and improving its health and accessibility.