Although increasingly viewed as a retrograde and deeply conservative art historical methodology, notable by its absence from many recent art historical ‘readers’ and ‘critical terms’ texts, connoisseurship has indisputably played a formative role in the development of the discipline. While connoisseurship defines itself as the rigorous formal and visual analysis of art works, since the 1970s the ‘new art histories’ have levelled accusations of myopia, the employment of loaded value judgments and the creation of an impermeable canon thus casting the practice as an anachronism. The figure of the connoisseur has long been a trope visualised in ‘high art’ and satirical renderings, which often point to the slippage between the connoisseurial gaze and scopophilia, suggesting the exercise of an aestheticising gaze over both art and femininity, a concern central to feminist critiques of traditional connoisseurship. 

The increasing material focus in art historical writing, influenced by the ascendancy of material culture studies, however, engenders the need to reassess the role of connoisseurship and its relevance and potential function in progressive scholarship. 

This panel invites papers that examine:

• key figures in connoisseurship
• the historiography of connoisseurship
• the visualization and hagiography of the connoisseur
• its strengths and weaknesses as a methodology
• its function in academic discourse; its relationship to the art market and the museum
• and its role, if any, in future scholarship.

We invite papers considering the connoisseur and the practice of connoisseurship from all periods and locations and encompassing a broad range of critical perspectives.

Sounds great!  I love the way they take 'conservative' as automatically bad ... in fact it's not just conservative, it's 'deeply conservative' (all the way to to the bottom?).  But wait, now 'material cultural studies' - a safely new sub-discipline - means that we might be able to re-assess.  I think comparing, say, Berenson's writing with that of someone like Griselda Pollock might give a different view of which 'canon' is impermeable!

On connoisseurship, I am pleased to leave study of feminist critique, and the purchase or Mr Hirst's pictures, to others, on the basis that it reduces competition in the more fulfilling pursuits of looking at, studying, and buying, pleasing, if conservative, pictures. A similar approach can be applied to football, politics and the culture of celebrity.

A bit of a worrying delight in polarisation for its own sake.

I thought all that divisive aggression had to be put to one side once Art History degrees became the preserve of the likes of Prince William and his wife.

Are we not able to have a ‘broad church’ whereby a putative connoisseur is also prepared to do a bit of the old marxist sociology / anthropology / economic theory too?

Your correspondents make some interesting points, but they risk being put on the back foot by the question.

The important question isn't conservative vs unconservative art, or 'right' v 'wrong' connoisseurs exactly, but art history as a human science, whether it's Rembrandt or Jeff Koons.

Every painting was painted at some point in time by somebody. In the whole scheme of human understanding it is more useful to know the answers to these questions than not, not least for the knock-on effect on our understanding of so much else.

Is it better to know that The Execution of Maximilian is as a record of a shocking recent event, craftily rejigged to make a personally risky attack on Napoleon III his own Head of State, by an artist who had witnessed firing squads in the streets of his own city? or is it enough to call it 'Nineteenth Century School 'Shot at Dawn' and spawn a lot of freewheeling studies that tell you more about their writer than what they're writing about?

Even the most rabid something-ist would agree we need to know a few basic details about The Execution of Maximilian. Where would they draw the line? All works of art sit in the middle of a similar web of people, philosophy and events. Who says, stop looking now, that's enough? It's interesting they drag in scopophilia, as 'voyeurism' - conjuring an image of some pervy print-collector in a Daumier. Skopeo, 'I look' in Greek, is a respectable word in science, and this anti-connoisseurial movement reminds me of the Inquisition ganging up on Galileo's telescope.

The backbone of every science, natural and human, is the what/when/how. No intelligent person in any other empirical discipline would believe that speculation was more valuable than pursuit of the truth. And no intelligent person should see art history as other than an empirical discipline.