As more and more people consume luxury goods and become interested in appreciating the finer things in life, the idea of connoisseurship will play a larger role in peoples’ hearts and minds. Indeed if becoming a connoisseur of art or “matters of taste” (such as wine, fine jewelry or even cigars) is something that more people want to do, an opportunity arises for those who own luxury brands and provide luxury goods.

This first post in our series will provide a definition of connoisseurship; the next will elaborate on what connoisseurs look for, the third will discuss connoisseurship’s split from academia, and the final post will discuss connoisseurship with an eye towards luxury.

To begin, we should define our terms. According to the Oxford Companion to Art (Oxford University Press 1970), a connoisseur is

“one who is more thoroughly equipped with sound aesthetic judgment than is an amateur. The connoisseur contributes insights which deepen, enlarge and advance aesthetic judgments which lie outside the purview of the expert.”

Adds Wikipedia,

“judgment informed by intuition is essential, but it must be grounded in a thorough understanding of the work itself.”

Connoisseurship, then, according to the OED, is

“the role or part of the connoisseur, critical acquaintance with works of art or matters of taste.”

Elliott Eisner, a Stanford professor who specializes in arts education, says that connoisseurship is

“the art of appreciation… (it) is a private act; it consists of recognizing and appreciating the qualities of a particular.”

Connoisseurship is about taking the time to fully appreciate your subject. A true appreciation requires not just research and analysis, but also introspection.

The next post in this series will discuss the four elements of connoisseurship: attribution, authenticity, condition and quality.

I thought it might be useful to have a simple definition of a luxury good on the site.

So I chose this, from wikipedia:

In economics, a luxury good is a good for which demand increases more than proportionally as income rises, contrast with inferior good and normal good. Luxury goods are said to have high income elasticity of demand: as people become more wealthy, they will buy more and more of the luxury good. This also means, however, that should there be a decline in income its demand will drop. It must be noted, though, that income elasticity of demand is not constant with respect to income, and may change sign at different levels of income. That is to say, a luxury good may become a normal good or even an inferior good at different income levels, e.g. a wealthy person stops buying increasing numbers of luxury cars for his automobile collection to start collecting airplanes (at such an income level, the luxury car would become an inferior good).