AFRICAN SAFARIS YACHTING NOW ART MARKET ANALYSIS DRESS WATCHES PRIVATE JETS SIGNATURE STONES Plus: Prime Markets – Assessing Global Real Estate A UTUMN 2019 From the Editor CHRISTIAN SCHWALBACH It’s hard to go anywhere at the moment without coming across art: hotels, airports, public spaces, private homes. There is something wonderful about this ubiquity – not least its economic impact, which in 2018 amounted to .4 billion in sales and .2 billion in directly related services – but there are also an increasing number of questions being asked as art expands its reach across our globe. In this issue, we look at the two most significant topics in the art world: technology and ethics. Neither is new, but both are on the tips of tongues everywhere from Frieze in London to Art Basel Hong Kong. Our story “What Does Blockchain Have to Do with Art?”, on page 50, examines the potential for the database concept behind bitcoin to mitigate two of the art world’s most harmful scourges, forgery and theft, as well as its heady promise of changing the way we collect and own individual works. Our second feature, “Can Art Go Home Again?”, page 45, lays out the ethical questions surrounding art repatriation. These questions concern not only private collections but also some of the world’s great public institutions, and they boil down to one overarching quandary: what should we do about art that was in some cases pillaged and in other cases sold by those who didn’t have a right to sell it? Our intuitions seem to differ on a case-bycase basis, and Jim Lewis does a stellar job of setting the scene for discussions that may well last the next few decades. Ethics – another topic that seems to be everywhere these days – is also in focus in Erin Riley’s first-person description of a new breed of safari (“Wild By Design”, page 94), which puts the emphasis on experiencing sustainability as much as animal sightings, and in our feature on electric tenders, a part of the expanded yachting coverage this issue that takes in everything from foiling to gigayacht marvels. Elsewhere in the magazine, you’ll find our usual mix of reports on fashion, travel and culinary developments, which we hope inspire you as much as they do us. As always, we wish you safe and happy travels and we look forward to seeing you on our companion website, centurion-magazine.com • Origami Black For this issue’s cover, Swiss origami master Sipho Mabona created a cast-ceramic sculpture based on the shape of a folded piece of paper. Photographed by Martin Kreuzer 16 CENTURION˜MAGAZINE.COM YOUR CODE FOR EXCLUSIVE ACCESS TO CENTURION˜MAGAZINE.COM: RL15CM
