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

Corporate Art Collections have been initiated and curated to educate staff, stimulate creative and out-of-the-box thinking, improve brand image, and express corporate cultural responsibility through support for artists and the art world. Yet while Corporate Art Collections are an important part of the international cultural and art worlds, their position, significance and agency in those realms are rarely considered in its transnational entirety. The usual perspective is either within national frameworks, or from a single disciplinary viewpoint - mostly that of art history.

This book presents the results of an interdisciplinary project in which economics, humanities and sociology have all been applied to understand the impact of corporate collecting on the cultural, economic, managerial and social levels. It contains contributions from a broad range of countries from the East and West, offering various approaches that illustrate how a combination of these perspectives can help to understand the essentially hybrid character of corporate art collecting. In doing so, this book provides a better understanding of the phenomenon while offering a framework for the advancement of its study.