Who owns interpretive authority?

An art historian presents a first text about an estate. The family reads it — and barely recognizes the artist in it. A phase of work that the family always considered especially important plays only a minor role. Instead, the author places works at the center that have so far received little attention. She draws connections to other positions and arrives at conclusions no one in the estate had expected.

Who knows the work better now?

Family members often possess knowledge that no archive holds in full. They remember conversations, working methods, personal relationships, and the situations in which works came into being. This knowledge can be extraordinarily valuable for engaging with an estate.

But memory changes. What has been told and retold within a family for decades can eventually take on the status of fact, even though it is barely traceable anymore what the statement was originally based on. A personal memory, a remark made by the artist, and a family narrative that developed later can merge into one.

Closeness creates knowledge. But it does not automatically create interpretive authority.

Conversely, scholarly distance does not automatically create truth. Art-historical classifications, too, emerge from particular questions, methods, and the knowledge of their time. A text can shape a field for decades and later be corrected by new sources or different perspectives. Categories shift, groups of works once thought marginal move to the center, established narratives are reconsidered.

That is exactly why it matters to distinguish between different kinds of knowledge. What is documented? What did the artist say? What does the family remember? What is a later art-historical interpretation? None of these perspectives is meaningless. But they are not the same thing.

Artists' own statements do not settle the question definitively either. They are especially important sources, because they offer direct access to thoughts, decisions, and self-understanding. But artists, too, look at their own work from shifting perspectives.

An early phase of work can later be disowned. Certain influences are emphasized, others downplayed. One's own biography is told in retrospect and possibly reweighted. What an artist says about a work at a given moment need not match what they see in it twenty years later.

Artists' own testimony is a privileged source — but not art history's last word.

This is where the task of independent research begins. It can compare sources, make contradictions visible, place works within larger contexts, and formulate questions that might never have been asked within a family or an estate.

Whoever enables independent research must therefore also accept that its findings may diverge from their own expectations. Independent research always means giving up a measure of control.

Conversely, this does not mean that scholarly statements are beyond challenge. An estate can correct errors, present previously unknown documents, or contradict an interpretation. Independence does not mean infallibility.

Something similar holds for curatorial work. An exhibition can look at a work through a question that neither the family nor earlier research had placed at the center. Works are brought together with other positions and thereby gain new contexts. Such a reading need not disprove earlier interpretations. It can simply ask a different question of the same work. In this way, the history of an artistic position grows together with the people who engage with it.

The power over the sources

In all this, an estate should not become the arbiter of which interpretation is the right one. Its particular responsibility lies elsewhere. It can make sure

• that sources remain preserved and findable,

• that the origin of information remains traceable,

• that memories and family knowledge remain recognizable as such,

• that research gains access to relevant materials,

• and that different interpretations remain possible.

In this sense, an estate may not hold interpretive authority. But it often has something that can be at least as consequential: substantial influence over access to the sources.

Who is allowed to view the archive? Which correspondence is made accessible? Which photographs may be published? Which documents remain private? Such decisions influence which questions can be asked at all and which connections can be examined.

A closed archive does not merely prevent one particular interpretation. It can prevent alternative interpretations from arising at all.

Whoever holds no interpretive authority can still have a substantial influence on which interpretations become possible.

Of course, openness does not mean that an estate must make every document unrestrictedly public. Personal rights, data protection, copyright, and private correspondence can set limits. What matters instead is the awareness that how one handles sources is itself part of the responsibility for the work.

Perhaps interpretive authority is, in fact, the wrong term. An estate can own works, manage archives, and preserve knowledge. But the meaning of an artistic work cannot be owned in the same sense.

Its responsibility lies elsewhere: to secure sources, to make knowledge traceable, and to enable others to ask new questions — even ones whose answers it might not itself welcome.

An estate therefore does not preserve the one history of a work. At best, it preserves the conditions under which its history can continue to be written.