BA, PhD (University College London)

 

Contact details

The Courtauld Institute of Art

Somerset House

Strand

London WC2R 0RN

 

katie.scott@courtauld.ac.uk


Katie Scott studied the history of art at University College London, from where she gained both a BA and a PhD.  She has taught at The Courtauld Institute of Art since 1988.

A specialist in French art and architecture of the early modern period, Katie Scott’s research interests focus on the relationship between works of art and their physical and social context.  The domestic interior, decoration, ornament and increasingly the decorative arts have been the objects of critical essays in exhibition catalogues, journals, edited collections and her book The Rococo Interior (Yale University Press, 1996). 

More recently she has been preparing a book length study on the origin of copyright and patent in the arts in early modern France.  Her interests have thus turned to questions of mechanical reproduction and the culture of the copy. Specifically, she has written about Chardin’s copies, repetitions and the reproductions of his genre paintings; she has also explored the ways in which François Boucher’s artistic persona was collectively produced by the reproduction of his work in print.

Other Courtauld based activities and activities outside the Institute:

In the context of the decorative arts, Katie Scott and Hannah Williams are contributing members of The Material Life of Things project at the CIA Research Forum, organized and chaired by Francesco Lucchini.  They are currently working on a dictionary or Abecedario of artists’ objects.

With regard to intellectual property, Katie Scott is giving a paper at the annual conference of International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property in Washington, which takes as its theme Geographies of Intellectual Property.

She is also a contributing member of the research project Agôn: La dispute: Cas, controverses et creations à l’époque moderne (France-Grande-Bretagne) chaired by Alexis Tadié, director of the Maison française at Oxford, a project funded by the Agence Nationale de La Recherche.

Katie Scott is herself co-chairing two conference panels in 2011: in February, jointly with Melissa Hyde, Rococo, late Rococo, post-Rococo, new Rococo at CAA in New York; and jointly with Richard Taws, Ephemera: Art and Obsolescence, at the AAH conference, at the university of Warwick in April.

She will give the annual Besteman Lecture at Oxford in November 2011.

 

research interests

 

  • History of art, architecture and the decorative arts in early modern France with particular interest in art theory, the relations of art, commerce and the law and reception of the Far East
  • The history and theory of decoration and the ornamental; the history and theory of intellectual property; art, material culture and theories of the everyday

 

Courses Taught in 2010-11

 

  • PhD: Art and the Everyday, critical reading and writing course.
  • MA: Between Genius and Industry: The Contradictory Histories of Drawing in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France with Professor David Solkin
  • MA: Labours and Pleasures of Distinction: Art and the interior in eighteenth-century France, taught jointly with the director and curators at the Wallace Collection.
  • BA 2nd Year: Rococo to Revolution
  • BA 2nd Year: Frameworks: and introduction to methods in art history
  • BA 1st Year: Chardin.

 

Recent publications

 

‘Playing Games with Otherness: Watteau’s cabinet chinois at La Muette’, JWCI (2003)

 

‘Framing Ambition: The Interior Politics of Mme de Pompadour’, Art History, 28/2 (2005) 248-90

 

Published in 2006

‘Reproduction and Reputation: “François Boucher” and the Formation of Artistic Identities’, in Rethinking Boucher, eds. Melissa Hyde and Mark Ledbury (2006) 91-132

 

In preparation

Becoming Property: art, theory and law in France in the Age of Enlightenment.


Keywords


Interior, ornament, rococo, the everyday, ephemera, intellectual property.