Call for Papers - Association for Art History Annual (AAH) Conference 2025

The AAH Annual Conference 2025 will take place at the University of York. ART team member Ana Bilbao invites papers for a panel she is co-facilitating on art and rights:

Art and Rights

Ana Bilbao, University of York,  ana.bilbao@york.ac.uk

Jonathan Cane, University of Warwick, Jonathan.E.Cane@warwick.ac.uk

Michael White, University of York, michael.white@york.ac.uk  

The incorporation of culture into the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (as ‘the right freely to participate in cultural life of the community’ and ‘the right to enjoy protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any […] artistic production’) reflected a longstanding entanglement of creative production with legal thinking that has not abated. If anything, a right-based approach to culture has become ever further cemented in the conception of how works of art come into being, are disseminated, collected and preserved.  

This panel investigates not only how art making is shaped now and in the past by rights but how the discipline of art history itself has internalised many right-based principles, such as those determining questions of authorship, expression, reproducibility and inheritability. Art and rights have each been commonly considered universal, human phenomena. However, thinking about them together quickly reveals their co-dependencies, either on other rights or on social institutions. Even the mere two cultural rights specified in the UDHR can be at odds with each other.  

Themes for discussion might therefore include conflict between cultural and other rights, changing conceptions of their universality or relativity, and the centrality or marginality of art to rights in general. We are particularly interested in the analysis of forms of artistic expression emerging as modes of prefigurative human rights practice and artistic practices dedicated to exploring the rights of nature. 

To offer a paper:

Please email your paper proposals directly to the session convenor(s). 

You need to provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 20-minute paper (unless otherwise specified), your name and institutional affiliation (if any). 

Please make sure the title is concise and reflects the contents of the paper because the title is what appears online, in social media and in the digital programme. 

You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two weeks.

Deadline for submissions: 1 November 2024