Dr.Bellingham.interview
Lara Julian: Dear readers of USA Art News, it is a great pleasure to present this special interview with Dr David Bellingham, a distinguished art historian, author, and Programme Director of the MA Art Business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London for over twenty years. Dr Bellingham is also an editor of the Antiquity volume of A Cultural History of Collecting and the host of The Art Business podcast. His profound insights into art market ethics, cultural heritage, and responsible stewardship have long enriched the global art community.
As an artist whose own practice explores colour, geometry, and transformative experiences through painting, I was delighted to moderate a recent panel discussion at The Conduit Club on “Art for Regenerative Futures: Sustainability, Savvy Collecting and Community Impact.” Dr Bellingham’s contributions were particularly illuminating, drawing on both contemporary developments and deep historical perspectives. Today, I am honoured to continue our conversation for USA Art News readers.
“Chromatic Legacies” exhibition by Lara Julian at the Conduit, London
Lara Julian: Dr Bellingham, over the last decade, what changes have you observed in how collectors, museums, and art businesses think about sustainability? Where do you see genuine progress happening, and where might it be more about rebranding?
Dr David Bellingham: I want to separate two things tonight: the language of sustainability and the plumbing of it. Back in 2016, in a chapter I co-wrote with the art lawyer Tom Christopherson, I described how “higher ethical standards” had become an increasingly important part of the branding and rebranding of auction houses and dealers. That was nearly a decade ago, and I think the same tension is still exactly where we are with sustainability today.
Here’s the gap in one statistic: a 2024 industry survey found that 86% of cultural audiences say they’re worried about the climate crisis, and 93% say they’ve personally changed their lifestyle because of it. But only 16% think cultural organisations themselves place great importance on their role in the climate emergency, even though 72% think those organisations should have real influence. That’s not a small gap. That’s an audience telling us, quite directly, that the sector talks a better game than it plays.
“Chromatic Legacies” exhibition by Lara Julian at the Conduit, London
Now, where is the progress real? I’d point to decisions that cost something operationally, because that’s the test. Nicholas Serota, back in 2011, publicly urged galleries to turn down the heating and rethink rigid climate-control conventions. This was a genuinely uncomfortable conversation for an institution built around conservation orthodoxy. The South London Gallery made a deliberate choice in its 2018 refit not to install air conditioning at all. The Rijksmuseum cut its energy use by 10% simply by adjusting HVAC schedules. These are decisions that show up on a balance sheet, not just in a press release.
But if you want the clearest evidence that this has moved from individual gesture to collective infrastructure, look at the Gallery Climate Coalition. It now has over 2,000 members across more than 50 countries, and, crucially, membership isn’t a badge, it’s a commitment: a decarbonisation action plan, regular carbon reporting, a published environmental responsibility statement. The Coalition’s own target is a 50% cut in the sector’s emissions from a 2019 baseline by 2030. And the case studies are genuinely operational, not aspirational: Thomas Dane Gallery saved £24,000 moving three shipments by sea instead of air; Hauser & Wirth avoided 200 tonnes of CO2e sending six exhibitions by sea; Kate MacGarry discovered that three return flights made up 30% of her entire gallery’s annual footprint, and simply stopped flying to fairs she could reach by train. That’s the same pattern as Serota and the Rijksmuseum – in other words, a decision that costs convenience, not just a statement that costs nothing. Even the major art fairs such as Frieze, Art Basel, TEFAF among them, have now co-signed a shared toolkit committing to carbon reduction targets collectively, which is a notable shift from competing on prestige to cooperating on emissions.
And where is it rebranding? Look at funding. BP ended its 26-year sponsorship of Tate in 2011, but that wasn’t really Tate’s sustainability journey; that was sustained activist pressure making the relationship untenable. The British Museum and the Science Museum are under the same pressure right now over their own fossil-fuel sponsors. Divestment, in other words, is very often something the sector is pushed into, not something it leads on.
And this isn’t new, historically. The Kimberley Process and CITES are both examples of the art and luxury world building an ethical framework only after scandal forced its hand. What’s different about GCC is that it’s largely getting ahead of that pattern rather than repeating it. So genuine progress, yes, where institutions make decisions that cost them something. Rebranding, also yes, wherever the sustainability language sits alongside business as usual rather than changing it.
“Chromatic Legacies” exhibition by Lara Julian at the Conduit, London
Lara Julian: Thank you for that candid and nuanced assessment. What can the history of collecting – from Ancient Rome to the Grand Tour and beyond – teach us about responsible stewardship today? And what mistakes should contemporary collectors avoid repeating?
Dr David Bellingham: Every generation of collectors likes to think it invented the ethical collection. It didn’t. Let me take you back much further than the Grand Tour, right back to Rome in 211 BCE, when the general Marcellus sacked Syracuse. Ancient historians themselves – e.g. Livy, writing about it later – say this was the moment that sparked Roman admiration for Greek art and encouraged further looting of sacred buildings, in the same sentence. Extraction and appreciation, entangled from the very beginning. That tension hasn’t gone away in two thousand years; if anything, tonight’s conversation is proof of that. Rome actually had its own internal ethical code around this, enforced not by law but by reputation. War spoils were expected to be dedicated to the gods, partly out of gratitude, but partly to avoid what the Romans themselves saw as a moral problem: private individuals appropriating consecrated objects for their own use. When generals broke that convention, they were publicly shamed for it: Cato censured Aelius Glabrio and Fulvius Nobilior for exactly this. Pompey, by contrast, was praised: he kept meticulous inventories of looted art, punished soldiers who stole from conquered peoples, and reportedly refused even to look at art he hadn’t formally acquired. That’s a two-thousand-year-old model of restraint versus excess.
My favourite example, though, is Cicero versus Verres: two contemporaries, on opposite ends of the same Roman art world. Cicero collected through his friend Atticus, who acted essentially as his art advisor and shipping agent in Athens – leading to legitimate, tasteful and aspirational acquisitions for his villas. Verres, meanwhile, was governor of Sicily and simply plundered it: sanctuaries, private homes, whatever he wanted. When Cicero prosecuted him, his argument wasn’t that collecting itself was wrong. It was that Verres had violated moderatio (restraint). That’s the same argument, in different clothes, that runs through every deaccessioning scandal I’ve studied since: it’s rarely the acquisition itself that’s condemned. It’s the excess, the lack of restraint, the disregard for what the object owes to something beyond the collector.
The mistake I’d flag for contemporary collectors is the same one UNESCO made in 1970, when it set a non-retroactive cutoff date for provenance claims, because it created a kind of legal safe harbour that lets us stop asking ethical questions the moment an object crosses an arbitrary date line. The Parthenon Marbles are the obvious example: a “clean” legal argument that hasn’t settled anything ethically, because the underlying question – “does the manner of original acquisition still matter?” – never actually goes away just because enough time has passed.
So my answer, in short: don’t mistake a legal cutoff for an ethical one, and remember that the tension between legitimate collecting and plunder is as old as collecting itself; Rome already knew the difference, and already had its own way of publicly shaming those who crossed the line.
Lara Julian: Fascinating historical parallels indeed. Throughout history, collecting has often been linked to ownership, status, and accumulation. Are we now seeing a shift towards stewardship, responsibility, and legacy? And what might this mean for the future of the art world?
Dr David Bellingham: Yes, but I’d argue it’s happened through plumbing, not through a change of heart.
Let me give you the origin point, again from Rome. In 146 BCE, the general Mummius sacked Corinth and took an extraordinary painting that had originally been bought by King Attalus of Pergamon for a huge sum. Mummius reclaimed it, and then placed it in a public sanctuary in Rome. Our sources describe this as the first foreign artwork to become public property in Rome. That idea, that a work of art might be held in trust rather than by private right, has an identifiable starting point, and it’s much older than most people assume.
Fast forward to 2006, and you get a very modern version of exactly the same argument, playing out over the sale of an L.S. Lowry painting by Bury Metropolitan Borough Council. It was legally theirs to sell and they got twice the estimate for it. But the museums’ accreditation body ruled that the sale caused a “loss of public trust,” and stripped Bury of its accredited status, cutting off future funding. Notice what actually did the enforcing there: not law, since the sale was entirely legal, but an institutional mechanism built specifically to protect stewardship over ownership. The same thing happened again in 2014, with the Sekhemka statue sale in Northampton. Two data points, eight years apart, showing the same enforcement mechanism operating consistently – which tells me this isn’t a one-off scandal, it’s become infrastructure.
“Chromatic Legacies” exhibition by Lara Julian at the Conduit, London
And that institutionalisation is still happening. Collections management itself has shifted, as a colleague of mine put it recently, “from a curator’s domain to that of the registrar,” professionalised through bodies like ARCS, with agreed international standards for documentation, due diligence, and stewardship that simply didn’t exist a generation ago. What used to be one person’s connoisseurship is now a formal risk-management cycle: documentation and research, conservation, protection, movements, running around every object in a serious collection. And it’s not just the registrar anymore, either: a properly managed collection today sits inside a network of specialists: auction houses, curators, conservators, insurers, lawyers, logistics companies, even lighting designers, each with defined responsibilities toward that object. That’s not a change in collectors’ hearts. That’s the profession building infrastructure around an idea whose ethical roots go back to Rome.
So is the shift real? Yes. But I’d resist the story that collectors have simply become more virtuous. What’s actually happened is that the argument that private accumulation owes something to the public – an argument Rome made through religious dedication, and we now make through accreditation bodies and loss-of-public-trust clauses – has slowly built itself a permanent enforcement mechanism. The future of the art world, I suspect, is less about whether people own art, and more about how visibly and accountably they’re required to hold it.
“Chromatic Legacies” exhibition by Lara Julian at the Conduit, London
Lara Julian: Thank you, Dr Bellingham, for these thoughtful and richly informed reflections. Your ability to bridge ancient wisdom with today’s pressing challenges offers valuable guidance for artists, collectors, and institutions alike. It has been a true pleasure and an honour to engage with your ideas. I look forward to many more such dialogues that advance regenerative practices in the art world.
This interview is published with the kind permission of Dr David Bellingham. Readers are encouraged to explore his work, including The Art Business podcast, for further insights.
Lara Julian
