Thoughts on Pierre Bourdieu, Souren Melikian and Krzysztof Pomian and their ideas of the nature of value in art.
Critique of connoisseurship
149 The saga of Bouwe Jans
The Van Gogh Museum has the good fortune of having acquired a tenacious, articulate, unforgiving critic with enough right on his side to teach it a valuable lesson. Whether the museum sees it that way I do not know; I‘m sure that I would not enjoy reading about myself the kind of things that the Dutch-English art dealer Bouwe Jans has published about the museum in his cantankerous book Artquakes and van Gogh. Yet the Van Gogh Museum and other arbiters of authenticity do have much to learn from his report. Continue reading “149 The saga of Bouwe Jans”
After I win the game I’ll tell you what the rules were, or A new Rembrandt from 1632
A painting that is ignored in the first three volumes of the Corpus of Rembrandt paintings has now been attributed to Rembrandt by the leader of the Rembrandt Research Project. His arguments give Schwartz reason to investigate his methods and ask what criteria should be addressed in judging the authorship of old master paintings. He first tells the story of how the painting was bought and sold since 1970.