Reimagining the Catalogue Raisonné as Generative Digital Scholarship

Abstract

Catalogues raisonnés have long determined the artistic relevance, authenticity, and market value of an artist’s work. While catalogue raisonné publishers and authors have grappled for decades with the challenges and opportunities of digital formats, conventions around scholarly authority have set boundaries for exploring a more expansive view of the catalogue raisonné as generative digital scholarship. In the case of digital scholarly publishing, how might we consider analog and digital formats not as a convergence of but rather a divergence from a broader transformation of these important resources? This paper explores how taking the catalogue raisonné as generative digital scholarship imbues old structures with new meaning, wherein the chronology of historical events can change shape across time. Furthermore, by embedding processes of verifiability, evidence, and transparency—key principles for supporting a generative scholarly ecosystem—the digital catalogue raisonné allows for a diversity of voices and thoughts in dialogue. With revisionist histories and technical information on artists and artworks in continuous flux, the generative catalogue raisonné model is an opportunity to rethink the past by considering how to construct narratives in the historical present.