CJS Thursday Lecture Series | Impending Cultural Collapse? - Current Transformations in Japan’s Traditional Art Markets

This talk addresses the origins of the remarkable weakening of today’s art markets and collecting practices in Japan. The financial reverses of the 1990s and subsequent decades helped lead to the weakening of the tea schools, the constriction of museum purchasing and the closure of some institutions. Simultaneous cultural trends have moved away from traditional art forms to new media including a shift from “art” to “design”, from “painting” to “illustration”, that is matched by westernization of domestic architecture and diminishing interest in cultural history that have eroded the appreciation and evaluation of traditional arts in an unprecedented manner.

After having taught for some years at the University of Michigan and the University of Washington, Prof. Berry has been doing research and teaching in Japan since the late 1990s. For the last several years he has been a researcher on a Japanese government Kaken research grant involving the redefinition of sensoga and a Mellon Curator-at-Large for the Indianapolis Museum of Art.