A New Institutional Discipline for Cultural Assets
Cultural Asset Governance is an emerging institutional discipline focused on structured management, documentation, safeguarding, and activation of cultural assets within a framework of accountability and oversight.
Cultural assets - art collections, archives, historical objects, and increasingly, digital materials - hold significant cultural, financial, and reputational value, yet are traditionally managed as collections rather than institutional assets. This often leads to inconsistent documentation, fragmented systems, unclear accountability and limited visibility across locations and departments.
Cultural Asset Governance addresses these structural gaps. It complements curatorial expertise by providing structure within which cultural stewardship can operate at institutional scale. Its purpose is to establish a shared approach to how these assets are documented, governed, safeguarded, made accessible, and strategically activated.
Luther M.E. Bottrill, Unsplash
Founder: Tamzin Lovell
Tamzin Lovell is the Founder and CEO of Artfundi and works at the intersection of art and enterprise infrastructure. Her goal is to help museums, corporations, foundations, and global galleries approach their collections as governed, scalable assets.
Through Artfundi, Tamzin developed a platform that evolved from an in-gallery workflow tool into enterprise-grade collection infrastructure. The platform supports institutions across jurisdictions with integrated systems that cover inventory control, compliance, governance, physical security integration, and operational continuity, with a focus on ISO/IEC 27001-aligned environments, multi-site oversight, and long-term data resilience.
Her career spans commercial galleries, research, brand strategy, and digital transformation, enabling her to connect curatorial operations with executive priorities that include risk management, systems integration, and institutional accountability.
Tamzin is also the founder of Armature Magazine, established to examine the structural mechanics of the art industry. Its podcast extension, Taller Together, continues these conversations with founders and institutional leaders, exploring how art businesses scale and sustain themselves. Cultural Asset Governance brings these strands of work together around a shared focus: infrastructure, governance, and resilience for high-value cultural assets.
Our Relationship with Artfundi
Cultural Asset Governance has been developed by Tamzin Lovell through the experience and institutional infrastructure work of Artfundi.
Artfundi is an art-tech company working on systems and infrastructure that support the management of cultural assets. Its experience across collection management, governance, digital infrastructure and institutional workflows provides an important practical foundation for the development of Cultural Asset Governance as a field.
The Cultural Asset Governance Initiative and Artfundi therefore have a transparent relationship: Artfundi provides an important body of practical experience from which the Initiative has emerged, while Cultural Asset Governance is focused on the broader development of the discipline, its frameworks, standards, research and professional practice.
Our Mission
Our mission is to establish Cultural Asset Governance as a recognised institutional discipline, developing the language, frameworks, standards and practices needed to govern cultural assets with greater accountability, visibility, control and resilience.
Our Vision
We envision a future in which cultural assets are governed with the same institutional rigour applied to other major asset classes: clear ownership, structured records, appropriate safeguarding, controlled access and the infrastructure required to support their long-term cultural and institutional value.
Cultural Asset Governance does not aim to replace existing expertise, but rather, to provide the governance structures and institutional infrastructure through which that expertise can operate effectively at scale.
Why the Initiative Exists
The environment surrounding cultural assets is changing.
Collections are widely distributed across locations, with institutions facing growing expectations around accountability, transparency, risk, insurance and fiduciary responsibility. At the same time, while digital transformation has created sophisticated infrastructure for many other institutional asset classes, cultural assets often remain managed through outdated systems and processes.
In many cases, institutions are starting from a point of fragmentation. Some have partial systems, others have established curatorial practices but limited infrastructure, and many have visibility gaps between locations, departments, and functions. What’s missing is a structured model.
The Cultural Asset Governance Initiative aims to help develop that model: a shared language, a clear framework, measurable standards and practical approaches for assessing and improving governance maturity. The Initiative will contribute to developing the field through research, frameworks, best practice, professional dialogue and applied thinking.
From Awareness to Implementation
Cultural Asset Governance is intended to be practical.
Effective governance requires complete, structured, and current records, with defined ownership, accountability, and policy; tracked and safeguarded assets; managed associated risks; controlled and structured visibility; and appropriate activation to generate cultural and institutional value.
The concern is not only record-keeping, but the systems required for consistent accountability, visibility, control, and activation.
Founding Advisory Board
The Cultural Asset Governance Initiative is assembling a Founding Advisory Board of international leaders across culture, governance, technology, policy, health and research. The Board will help guide the development of the field, its frameworks and good practice. Advisor profiles will be added as appointments are confirmed.
Future Fellows Network
Alongside the Board, the Initiative is developing a Future Fellows Network for researchers, practitioners and institutional leaders who want to contribute through research, working groups, publications and applied practice. Details of the participation model will be published as the Initiative develops.