BEIRUT: What’s the point of owning a beautiful collection — whether art or collectibles — if there’s no proper way to showcase or preserve it?
This question lies at the heart of The Open Crate, a platform designed to help collectors digitize and preserve their collections. At the company, senior specialists Amina Debbiche and Nora Mansour help provide an inventory and archiving service that catalogs everything from fine art and furniture to watches, books, and pens.
“People know exactly which crypto they have in their portfolio. But when it comes to art, they don't even remember the name of the artist on the wall,” said Mansour, a Lebanese finance expert.
Debbiche and Mansour noted the urgency of digitizing art catalogues — especially in the Arab world.
“The thing with art, especially in our region of the world, is that it’s mostly held in private hands,” said Debbiche, who is from Tunisia.
The privatization of artwork in a region with hotspots of instability makes the act of documentation a deeply political one: a means of preserving the unspoken victims of war — art.
To explain this, Mansour gave Arab News a hypothetical example: think of a Palestinian family in Jerusalem whose house is looted — if their artwork is documented, there’s proof it existed. It’s a map of what you own.
“It’s like our child, you know — it’s like having a baby together,” Mansour joked.
The child they created, The Open Crate, boldly and indirectly addresses an unspoken issue that has long plagued the region. Like any child, it has the potential to grow and carve out a name that its ancestors, and future generations, can be proud of.
