ABSTRACT
This chapter examines auction house catalogues, and the role its components play in identifying the objects for sale. While colour photography can create a more embellishing context than black and white, it is important to remember that colour also provides more visual information, and potentially more accurate visual information. Significant changes happened in the late 1970s, during the period of the tribal art boom. The style, format and content of catalogue descriptions have remained dry and specimen-like throughout. Since the beginning of catalogue production, provenance, the object’s repertoire of owners, has been one of the most prominent and consistently employed textual components. Footnotes have become significantly more prominent in catalogues. The most universal buying criterion for collectors, not surprisingly, is the object’s visual form. The salience of visual form does not however preclude a prominent role for the object’s sociological significance as a buying criterion.
