John Hood, a professor of the Italian renaissance and 17th & 18th century European art history at Oberlin College, has remarked on a past syllabus about how connoisseurship, the sophisticated appreciation and contemplation of objects, is no longer an academic ideal. His definition of connoisseurship is a good one:
Connoisseurship is actually a technical term that encompasses the range of practices by which one tries to establish the status of a work of art as an object. Connoisseurs, therefore, try to figure out a particular object’s date, its material structure, its provenance or history of ownership, its maker, and so forth. Thus connoisseurship is the central and most important tool for any curator in an art museum. In fact, only the museum’s standards of connoisseurship determine the quality and importance of its collection.
But regarding the academic popularity of connoisseurship, he notes:
In Art History departments throughout the English-speaking world today, words like “style,” “masterpiece,” “quality,” and “beauty” carry many, mostly negative, associations. Of all such academically unfashionable terms, however, none enjoys a worse reputation than “connoisseurship.” … Until the 1970s, some training and expertise in connoisseurship was part and parcel of advanced education in most of the nation’s major graduate schools of Art History. Since then, however, deprecating connoisseurs and their practice as elitist, imperialist, sexist, or even racist has become chic, at times even de rigeur, for art historians who like to count themselves among the shock troops of the methodological avant-garde.
Indeed, other scholars agree. Judith Keller, the associate curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, said in an interview published in the December 2004 issue of art on paper magazine:
[Connoisseurship’s] importance has been reduced within the art market, but I don’t hold the market entirely responsible for this. When a collector is looking at work, the people who are presenting that work should be connoisseurs themselves, and should be able to speak to the merits of the work. But an entire generation hasn’t gotten this instruction at the university level. The teaching of connoisseurship has been enormously reduced in the academic world, where theory rules. It’s simply not about the object anymore.
If it’s not about the object anymore, then what is ‘it’ about? As Hood suggests, political correctness and the rise of multiculturalism and postmodernism may account for some of the reason for connoisseurship’s academic decline. American conservative commentator George Will decries the scourge of postmodernism in a Newsweek column on connoisseurship from 2001:
Connoisseurship assumes that high-quality art is rare, rather than equally common to all cultures. Connoisseurship assumes that excellence in art can be defined and identified by scholarly judgments that are more than political acts or manifestations of cultural biases. Connoisseurship assumes that esthetic values have ethical force—that high art is elevating, that it pulls those who comprehend it up from the everyday. … All this offends the postmodern sensibility: the idea that enlightenment requires effort is unacceptable because it means that it is not equally “accessible” to everyone.
But in a rebuttal to Will’s piece in Salon Magazine, David Raskin, an assistant professor of art history, theory and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, notes that connoisseurship and postmodern sensibilities aren’t mutually exclusive—contemporary connoisseurship just has a new purpose:
Originally, museums were the private collections of noblemen. They were designed to protect and ensure the value of the art these collectors acquired. They were not open to the public, and histories were written around promoting the value of the specific art within them. Nowadays museums understand the value of art not in terms of dollars, but in the furthering of a shared tradition. They are concerned with building a shared culture, not one built on nostalgia for a long-dead past.
The modern purpose for connoisseurs then, in addition to appreciating and understanding art and “matters of taste,” is to further shared traditions and cultures. How connoisseurs go about doing this today in a non-academic, luxury-related context will be the subject in our next and final post in this connoisseurship series.
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