Previous Posts: September 2012

Why has Hunt been so loathed? [...]

But when it came to the crunch, there seemed to be very little nurture in the air: quite the opposite. While few in the arts would have argued that the culture budget should have been immune from necessary public spending cuts, there was a particular unpleasantness in the manner in which the 30% cuts to the arts were handed down in 2010: presented as a 15% cut to "front line" services – a false division (front line/back office) if ever there was one. Then there was the sudden, immediate, brutal culling of the UK Film Council and Museums, Libraries, Archives Council: while few would have argued that either were model organisations, the ruthlessness with which they were despatched reeked of ideological fervour rather than considered action. In short, people began to suspect that Hunt's priority had been to wield the axe with an efficiency that would endear him to his superiors rather than to "support, nurture and encourage the arts". The early rhetoric looked, in retrospect, like a conscious decision to attempt to "decontaminate" brand Tory, rather than borne of any real conviction. The sense of betrayal – the rhetoric set next to the reality – has been enormous.

In retrospect, we may come to see former culture secretary Jeremy Hunt as a friend to culture. With the help of arts minister Ed Vaizey, he largely managed to restrict cuts in the spending under his control to 15%. 

He also protected free admission to national museums, retained Renaissance funding for regional museums and increased the share of lottery money going to the arts and heritage. (He began to try to strengthen philanthropy, but was badly undermined by idiotic Treasury views that donating to charity is a form of tax-dodging.)

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts announced Wednesday it will disperse its entire collection of works from the ground-breaking pop artist through sales and donations.

The profits will be used to bolster the foundation's grant-making activities, with Christie's entering a long-term deal to market the works.

"Christie's will conduct phased sales over a period of years using multiple platforms, including single artist live auctions, private sales and continuing online auctions, bringing a wide range of Warhol's art -- much of which has never before been seen by the public at large -- to existing as well as new collectors worldwide," a statement from the two partners said.

Museums in London suffered dramatic falls in visitor numbers in the run-up to the Olympics, with some as much as 40% down on last year.

Central London was the worst hit: the British Museum lost 169,970 visitors in July, while the number of visitors to paid-for exhibitions at Tate Modern and Tate Britain fell in the first week of August. 

The number of visitors to the National Portrait Gallery fell by 58,461 in July compared with 2011, while the National Gallery had 40% fewer visitors in the first week of August.

In west London, the Natural History Museum reported about 8,000 fewer visitors during June and July. 

In south-east London, the National Maritime Museum, part of the Olympic equestrian arena, changed its opening hours to encourage spectators to visit the museum but still lost 11,167 visitors in July. It did, however, welcome an extra 63,356 visitors in June.

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.

Posthumous castings from finished bronzes, unauthorized casts such as those made as a result of work being in the public domain, enlargements unsupported by verifiable instructions from the artist, posthumous translating of a carving into bronze, or work in any material other than wax, terra cotta, and plaster that is bronze cast for the first time, are undesirable.