Reconsidering Connoisseurship

Superdealer and secondary-market legend, Richard Feigen, penned a passionate defense of connoisseurship for The Art Newspaper recently, mourning its "death" and calling for guidelines to help determine what's fake from what's genuine among the "factory"-produced art created by many of today's best-known contemporary artists:

So what constitutes a fake? With old masters, connoisseurs devote themselves to distinguishing the master’s hand from the assistants’, and this can be done, even with objects from the pre-humanist period, when the patronage was religious and strictly formulaic. [...]

Of course there are contemporary artists whose hands are much more present in their work. It would be easy to tell a fake Jasper Johns or Anselm Kiefer even if the artists weren’t around to nail the fakers. Nor have I ever seen a fake Max Beckmann.

But since out of Duchamp’s box have sprung legions of art-makers, some with active factories, guidelines are clearly needed to tell the fake from the genuine. If the artist is alive, his word must prevail. Unless he has gone gaga or been coerced and the decision-making delegated. Or his widow or designee been corrupted. There was even an instance, related to me first-hand, when out of pity for the impoverished Dominguez, de Chirico actually signed a Dominguez fake “de Chirico”.

As much as I appreciate his position, I was a bit disheartened that Mr. Feigen's ultimate argument for authenticity seemed to reside in how much more money one could charge for work whose author had been verified:

In January 2000, a painting attributed to the rare painter, Arcimboldo, was sold at Sotheby’s, New York, for $1.5m. It has never been accepted as by Arcimboldo himself, and it has never been resold. In December 2005, two panels attributed to Bernardo Daddi, estimated at £50,000-£70,000, were sold at Sotheby’s, London for £400,000. One of the pair has now been identified as by Orcagna, an even greater and rarer master.

In December 2006, a painting catalogued as by a Rubens follower was sold in Sweden for $2.4m, then subsequently established as an autograph Rubens and resold privately for four times that amount. In October 2007, a painting estimated at $3,000 was sold in a provincial British sale as a Rembrandt copy for $5m, then fully accepted by the Rembrandt authority and valued at four times the cost. In July 2008, a painting catalogued as by Van Dyck was sold at Christie’s, London, for £3m, but the jury is still out as to whether Van Dyck painted it; there were many who thought not. All of this falls under the canopy of connoisseurship, the “dead” discipline.

Indeed, these anecdotes serve to highlight just how subjective a science connoisseurship tends to be. Furthermore, as incidents from the life of Bernard Berenson (perhaps the most illustrious connoisseur within the past 100 years) demonstrate, even opinions a connoisseur may be willing to swear to in court can change over time.

None of which is to suggest that connoisseurship isn't important, but that the application of such an inexact science will probably always involve suspiscion and that perhaps a new line of thinking about authenticity is needed more than guidelines for establishing "examples where the artist would have approved." Especially as more and more important artists push beyond the object.

Our current project space exhibition by Shane Hope (which got a nice review on Rhizome the other day, btw) imagines a future in which an artwork's media may include materials as unverifyably authentic perhaps (it's hard to tell, most of the materials don't yet exist) as a "Non-rival routing hyper-spatial wormhole in floating sheet of veiny tissue culture" or an "airborne recreational disease." I'm on the record as saying I entirely disagree with the notion that anyone else can declare what an artist presents as his or her work is "not art" and indeed feel that such limited thinking stymies the imagination, so if we could, I'd like to move past that discussion for just this once...especially as there's simply no telling whether a "non-rival routing hyper-spatial wormhole in floating sheet of veiny tissue culture" wouldn't be the single most beautiful thing mankind ever saw...in order to ponder what connoisseurship might mean in such a future.

In addition to "distinguishing the master’s hand from the assistants’," I have always felt connoisseurship included distinguishing a major work from an important artist's minor works. Furthermore, in a larger sense, it involves distinguishing quality between works by different artists. With all that in mind, then, say the wormhole floating in a culture piece Shane imagines is unquestionably an aesthetically excellent work. Like Michaelangelo's David, only the obstinate would argue it's not beautiful. But the damn piece just won't sit still. What does determining authenticity for such a work even mean? (If you really want to give yourself a headache, consider what it might mean if the future artist were an artificial intelligence.)

I realize I'm jumping way ahead of the game here (what with the debate as to whether a readymade is art still playing itself out), but perhaps the current milieu of connoisseurship needs to jump out ahead of things as well. At this point, running to catch up as it is, it's not really serving artists (not that it ever did, but it seems to be acting as a speed bump if you ask me) and increasingly barely serving collectors. Indeed, much of the criteria for contemporary connoisseurship stems from Johann Joachim Winckelmann's tome History of Ancient Art, and as much as I'm proud of my long distant relative's contribution to the field, he did publish the thing in 1764. Perhaps its time for a bold new lunge forward in how we think about such matters.