E-grāmata: Connoisseurship

"Within the rarefied world of art collecting, connoisseurship signifies esoteric knowledge used to judge the quality, exclusivity, desirability and even authenticity of art. As this collection of essays demonstrates, however, connoisseurship is not confined to the art world but rather practised in a variety of settings by elites and consumers alike. This volume presents a fresh approach to connoisseurship, creating a broad international dialogue about its meaning and application. It ranges across such diverse fields as consumer history, sociology and ethnography, earth science, forensic science and art history. It demonstrates that connoisseurship can be both intuitive and scientific, utilizing comparison and tied to measures of value and market dynamics"--

Despite the central importance of connoisseurship in the rarefied world of art collecting, it occupies an uncomfortable position in modern scholarship. On the one hand, the concept retains a significant role in the study of art and the care of public and private collections when it is linked with art appreciation, qualities visible to the attuned eye, or the processes of attribution and authentication. On the other hand, the last century has seen connoisseurship marginalized in academic discourse: it is often associated with amateurism, social elitism, status-display, and intellectual mystification.

The present collection of essays enters this breach and--by adopting a broad, interdisciplinary approach--considers connoisseurship afresh, investigating its practice in both familiar and unexpected places. Essays on the role of connoisseurship in Western art history appear alongside innovative, global perspectives on Chinese numismatics and walnut collecting, wine and coffee expertise, the market for geological specimens, and the parallels between Morellian connoisseurship and modern forensics. These essays resonate with one another in surprising ways and create new dialogues about connoisseurship's meaning and application, demonstrating that its practice can be both intuitive and scientific.