State of the field: Digital catalogues raisonnés, 2020 - 2025
In the autumn of 2025, Navigating.art set out to better understand the state of the digital catalogue raisonné field with the aim of sharing its findings and facilitating exchange among art professionals. Through conversations among art historians, archivists, and administrators, we learned about the potential of digital tools, the value of print publications, approaches to completion, the evergreen topic of funding, and the possibilities of artificial intelligence. This resource brings survey data into conversation with recent publications about and around the topic of digital catalogues raisonnés to provide a sketch of the discussions, controversies, challenges, and successes that define the contemporary field of digital catalogues raisonnés.
Findings reveal that institutional support proves decisive for project sustainability, while authority increasingly derives from procedural transparency and collective oversight rather than individual connoisseurship. Software choices profoundly shape scholarly possibilities, with commercial platforms reducing friction between historians and technologists while custom solutions enable intellectual specificity at significant costs. Recent projects, including the Romare Bearden, Eva Hesse, and Isamu Noguchi catalogues raisonnés, illustrate emerging models for balancing accessibility, scholarly rigor, and long-term viability. Survey data confirms that digital longevity remains fundamentally an organizational problem requiring governance structures rather than technological solutions alone. The field's central challenge of ensuring scholarly standards while remaining economically viable remains unresolved, with a persistent gap between well-resourced institutional projects and the independent scholarship that documents many significant artists.
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