Jeremy Melius, “Connoisseurship, Painting, and Personhood,” Art History, April 2011, 289.
Allan Wallach, Bully Pulpit, Panorama, Fall 2015 →
“Classic cars are gaining attention due to their nearly 500 percent returns over the past decade, outpacing art and wine by more than 100 percent, as reported by the Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index.” Deborah Nason, “‘Passion investing’ in classic cars is gaining speed,” CNBC, January 4, 2016 →
Martin Riese, “How America’s Only Water Sommelier Is Changing the Way People Taste H20,” Eater, April 7, 2015 →
Sarah Maslin Nur, “Unwrapping the Mythos of Mast Brothers Chocolate in Brooklyn,” New York Times, December 20, 2015 →
Holland Cotter, “Toward a Museum of the 21st Century,” New York Times, October 28, 2015 →
Hal Foster, “After the White Cube,” London Review of Books, March 19, 2015 →
Carolina Miranda argues that it is, in fact, designed to be experienced photographically, remarking that Rain Room is “more of a one-sided Hollywood set ideal for picture-making than a full-fledged environmental installation that will subsume you with its awesome water power.” Carolina A. Miranda, “Art for Instagram: 3 lessons from LACMA’s ‘Rain Room,’” Los Angeles Times, December 2, 2015 →
See Ben Davis, “Scented Candle Installation Brings Optimistic Mood to Lower Manhattan,” artnet News, December 16, 2015 →
Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), 70.
Ibid., 180.
Ibid., 187.
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (New York: Vintage: 1996), 335.
Elaine O’Brien, “The Location of Modern Art,” Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms, eds. Elaine O’Brien, Everlyn Nicodemus, Melissa Chiu, Benjamin Genocchio, Mary K. Coffey, Roberto Tejada (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 5.
Dōshin Satō, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: The Politics of Beauty (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011).
The transformation of Japanese artist identity from “artisans with technical skills” to “full-fledged intellectuals who could express their individual impressions of the world” would develop fully only after the initial period of corporatism of Japan’s early industrial drive, and as a reaction to the latter. Gennifer Weisenfeld, “Western Style Painting in Japan: Mimesis, Individualism, and Japanese Nationhood,” Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 171.
Prior to Jonathan Richardson (1667–1745), the English cultural elite favored a “cabinet of curiosities” aesthetic, and had little value for art or the artist as particularly exalted. As late as 1689, one of the leading cultural figures of his day, John Evelyn (1620–1706), could write, “I am in perfect indignation of this folly as when I consider what extravagant summs … given for a dry scalp of some (forsooth) Italian painters hand let it be of Raphael or Titian himselfe, [which would be
For Richardson, attribution was slightly less important than the discernment of “Quality,” for which he had devised a humorously elaborate eighteen-point scale. See Carol Gibson-Wood, Studies in the Theory of Connoisseurship from Vasari to Morelli (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988), 103–107.
Carlo Ginzberg compares Morelli’s method to both Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud, who, indeed, was influenced by Morelli. See “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 96–125.
Giovanni Morelli, Italian Painters: Critical Studies of Their Works, trans. Constance Jocelyn Ffoulks (London: John Murray, 1900), 59 →
Ibid., 60.
Ibid., 59.
As to day-to-day politics, Morelli served in parliament and was a partisan of the Count of Cavour. He was a patriot who fought in the revolutions of 1848, but was a moderate monarchist rather than on the side of the radical left-wing elements of the Italian political scene. “Principles and Method” ends with an allusion to Morelli’s self-perception as fitting nowhere between two extremes: unable to find the Italian connoisseur, the Russian narrator finds that those who knew him offer contradictory accounts of his fate and political profile: One person remembers him as a “Codino,” or reactionary monarchist, while another describes him as having been an “anarchist.” Ibid., 61–62.
Ibid., 25.
Ibid., 9.
Morelli’s relationship to the art market was itself contradictory. On one hand, he acted as a broker for many famous Italian works of art, helping to shape, in particular, Britain’s National Gallery. On the other, a law protecting Italy’s artistic heritage from sale bears his name.
Gibson-Wood, 246.
Because the idea of the artist thus proposed represented a fictional unity, it was possible to conjure a coherent “artistic personality” where none existed. Such is the case with Berenson’s creation “Amico di Sandro,” his name for a previously unknown Renaissance artist that he deduced lay behind a sequence of works that were connected to, but did not fit the exact signatures, of any of an array of major figures. The intuition later proved to be false. “In Amico di Sandro he [Berenson
Bernard Berenson, Rudiments of Connoisseurship: Study and Criticism of Italian Arts (New York: Schocken Books, 1962), 114.
Michel Foucault, “What Is An Author?” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1999), 210–211.
It is amusing to note that a controversy hovers over the authorship of Fountain. In April 1917, Duchamp wrote a letter stating, “One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; it was not at all indecent—no reason for refusing it. The committee has decided to refuse to show this thing. I have handed in my resignation and it will be a bit of gossip of some value in New York.” That artist would likely have been Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the proto-Dada, proto-performance artist, a known associate of Duchamp’s who had already been working in found-object art. Contemplating what the implications of such a monumental reattribution would be throws into relief the degree to which our understanding of this quintessentially anti-artisinal artwork rests on the classic obsession of connoisseurship: appreciation of the “artistic personality” behind the work. See Sophie Howarth, revised by Jennifer Mundy, “Marcel Duchamp: Fountain,” Tate website →
“Duchamp signed each of these replicas on the back of the left flange ‘Marcel Duchamp 1964’. There is also a copperplate on the base of each work etched with Duchamp’s signature, the dates of the original and the replica, the title, the edition number and the publisher’s name, ‘Galleria Schwarz, Milan’. For some, such replicas seemed to undermine cardinal qualities of ready-mades, namely, that they should be mass-produced items and ones chosen by an artist at a particular moment and time. Duchamp, however, was happy to remove the aura of uniqueness surrounding the original ready-mades, while the production of replicas ensured that more people would see the works and increased the likelihood that the ideas they represented would survive.” Ibid.
Indeed, in his 1960 denunciation of Morellian connoisseurship of painting, Edgar Wind describes its implications in terms that prophecy many a critique of the gamesmanship of Conceptual Art: “If we allow a diagnostic preoccupation to tinge the whole of our artistic sensibility, we may end by deploring any patient skill in painting as an encroachment of craftsmanship upon expression.” Edgar Wind, “Critique of Connoisseurship,” Art and Anarchy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1985), 46.
Lawrence Levine traces how the “high culture” model of sacred solo author came to be transposed onto practices that would seem distant from them. “To say that sacralization remained an ideal only imperfectly realized is not to deny that it became a cultural force. As with many ideals, the contradictions were resolved not primarily by denying them but more powerfully by failing to recognize them. Thus the great Hollywood director Frank Capra, who was, as all directors are, dependent upon writers, cameramen, editors, and actors, could assert as his credo and the reality of his career: ‘One man, one film.’ Film directors who ignored, or downplayed, the collective nature of their art and conceived of themselves as auteurs, with the model of the novelist so clearly in mind, were not aberrations.” Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 168.
See Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)
Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” in Film Culture Reader, ed. Adams P. Sitney (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 132.
According to Hitchcock’s biographer, Truffaut’s book of interviews “hurt and disappointed just about everybody who had ever worked with Alfred Hitchcock, for the interviews reduced the writers, the designers, the photographers, the composers, and the actors to little other than elves in the master carpenter’s workshop.” Donald Spoto, The Dark Side Of Genius: The Life Of Alfred Hitchcock (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1999), 495.
Foucault, 222.
Hobsbawm continues: “The images that became the idols of such societies were those of mass entertainment and mass consumption: stars and cans. It is not surprising that in the 1950s, in the heartland of consumer democracy, the leading school of painters abdicated before image-makers so much more powerful than old-fashioned art.” Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1913–1991 (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 513.
David Harvey, “The Art of Rent,” Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London, Verso, 2012), 109–110.
Michael Shanks, “car collection—connoisseurship and archaeology,” mshanks.com, March 8, 2015 →
Fascinatingly, Walter Benjamin, the theorist of the revolutionary potentials of “mechanical reproducibility,” also seems to give the best account of revolutionary connoisseurship: “The most profound enchantment of the collector is the locking of the individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property. The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership—for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.” Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 60.
Theodor Adorno, “Adorno to Benjamin,” Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007), 123.