In order to have taste, it is not enough to see and to know what is beautiful in a given work. One must feel beauty and be moved by it. It is not even enough to feel, to be moved in a vague way: It is essential to discern the different shades of feeling. Nothing must escape an instantaneous perception. Here again intellectual and artistic taste resembles sensual taste: Just as the gourmet immediately perceives and recognizes a mixture of two liqueurs, so the man of taste, the connoisseur, will discern in a rapid glance any mixture of styles. He will perceive a flaw next to an embellishment. — Voltaire, 1757

Connoisseurship is a dead language and a dead art. Or so art theorists with disdain for aesthetic judgments would have us believe for some 40 years now. Indeed, connoisseurship has long languished — unfashionable and unpracticed — in academic circles and beyond. But still it matters for many people, and there are signs of a renaissance, even in the most unlikely realms of the art world. The time is ripe for reconceiving connoisseurship as relevant to furthering culture and seeing with maximum powers of observation that which humankind creates.

Connoisseurship is deeply rooted in the past. Etymologically, it derives from the Latin cognoscere (to know), and conceptually, it dates back to ancient Greece, where people began valuing art for its aesthetic merits, rather than for its imagined superpowers to placate deities. By the time a market for classical Greek sculpture was flourishing in Augustan Rome, acknowledged experts were opining on originals and copies and on matters of taste generally. With terms like judicium subtile videndis artibus (subtle judgment in seeing art), the nascent language of connoisseurship invoked the intellect and the senses. Connoisseurship has retained its classical associations ever since.

After waning in the Middle Ages, it regained currency in the Renaissance with a market that included paintings and drawings. The 18^th century was a Golden Age, as connoisseurship entered the English lexicon (in 1719 via painter -collector Jonathan Richardson as “connoissance”) and developed into an intellectual discipline with philosophers like Voltaire penning elegant discourses. More than a century of fine-tuning ensued, with methodologies echoing forms of literary criticism: e.g., “legislative” (judgment based on a priori canons), “scientific” (judgment based on objective criteria), “expository” (explanation without judgment), and “impressionistic” (personal responses with or without judgment). Approaches ranged broadly from striving for scientific objectivity (Giovanni Morrelli’s morphological analysis) to those engaging in subjective appreciation (Anatole France’s “adventures of a soul among masterpieces”).

Though widely regarded far into the 20^th century as essential for collecting, curating, and critiquing, connoisseurship suffered attacks early on. Enlightenment commentators worried that it was easily corrupted by market forces and unduly focused on establishing financial value, rather than on loftier artistic aspects (still true today). Such tendencies spurred protracted debate, but connoisseurship never withered until the 1960s, when champions of Marxism, Feminism, Relativism, Postmodernism, and Multiculturalism began to discredit it as elitist, sexist, unscientific, and irrelevant to socio-political-economic studies of art, among other harsh pejoratives. Today, connoisseurship is largely relegated to identifying valuable works (mostly by long-dead artists) in service of commodification, rather than art appreciation.

The Features of Connoisseurship

To ascertain why it has been so marginalized, one must examine common conceptions and methods of connoisseurship. Certain salient rational and sensual capacities characterize the ideal connoisseur. First, a capacity for prolonged, practiced looking: patient, in-person, close-up examination of countless works of art, comparing and contrasting them to discern their most subtle distinguishing characteristics. Connoisseurs consider the totality of art, practicing what theorist Max Friedländer preached: “He who knows but one master knows him insufficiently.” One thus cultivates a “good eye” through unconscious mastery of the art of perception. This must be accompanied by a keen visual memory. The best connoisseurs, as collectors of visual experiences, have a remarkable Proustian capacity for instantaneous memories of the most fugitive “fragments of existence withdrawn from Time.” They also possess the power of “intuition,” or what Voltaire calls “feeling,” registering the smallest perceptions of a work’s ineffable “essence.” (Think of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling 2005 book, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking.) Finally, the connoisseur must paradoxically master communicating nonverbal perceptions through verbal opinions and judgments, delivered with sufficient objectivity and authority to carry weight with others.

These attributes may seem beyond reproach, but the fact that it requires considerable effort to become a connoisseur is objectionable to those who criticize anything not equally “accessible” to everyone. Moreover, reliance on inarticulable intuition in establishing authorship and authenticity (in the absence of empirical evidence or logical reasoning) likewise incites mistrust among those already suspicious of the fact that the designation of connoisseur requires no licensing, certification, or regulation (the old fear of “snake oil salesmen”).

Connoisseurship elicits further opprobrium when it seeks to rank works, since aesthetic judgments are subjective and aesthetic experience involves an element of schadenfreude. Detractors also deride it as an ethnocentric vocation of privileged white Anglo-Saxon males, rooted in the era when they practiced connoisseurship on their Grand Tours of Europe. During these long expeditions, young men collected expensive works as signifiers of social status — the kind of connoisseurs admiring paintings and sculptures in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence so spectacularly depicted here by Johann Zoffany. Ironically, democratized art consumption, no longer reserved for aristocrats and blue bloods, has eroded its social cachet.

Today’s Challenges

Add to this the contradictions between connoisseurship and contemporary art. Old-school connoisseurs, who favor “masterpieces” of the past over “mediocrities” of the present, are much to blame in alienating the contemporary art world. Traditional formalist stylistic analysis of visual elements likewise excludes contemporary art objects that have more to do with ideas than with how well something is rendered. When the artist’s hand is absent from ready-mades or commissioned objects, attribution and craft matter little, and conventional connoisseurs have trouble adapting their skills to other purposes. In cases of performance, “process-oriented,” and “instruction-based” art, for which no physical object even exists in a post-medium age, object-based connoisseurship is left out in the cold. (Marcel Proust was prophetic when he said that “Museums are dwellings that house only thoughts.”) Connoisseurship recedes, too, as contemporary notions of visual “culture” usurp “Art with a capital A.”

Other, more benign, factors are eroding connoisseurship. Scientific aids (e.g., x-radiography) are now widely preferred to the naked eye, though connoisseurs must interpret the data. Much of the world’s art can be seen, moreover, in lavishly illustrated books and high-resolution digital images on the Internet. In violation of the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s acquaintance principle, we increasingly forgo first-hand experience of the actual works on which connoisseurship depends. Yet no matter how fine, a reproduction can never exactly reproduce color, texture, scale, or volume. In art pilgrimages, cameras replace sketchbooks, minimizing mental and visual engagement before moving on to the next must-see work. Our time-pressed, short-cut oriented society stunts our eye. Probing physical, psychological, and emotional experiences of art are rare for all but the most purposeful art lovers.

Still further erosion of object-based connoisseurship stems from scarcity of great material in the market. What remains moves up the food chain, such that a still-abundant supply of late-period Picassos (once dismissed as incoherent scrawls of a past-his-prime master) now enjoys the same “masterpiece” status once reserved for Blue, Rose, Cubist, and Classical period Picassos. In some cases, rapprochement is merited, and decades of received opinion are rightly set aside, but in others, standards are lowered. Connoisseurs are only as good as what their eye consumes. Fewer great ones may inhabit the ranks of “the Trade” in years to come. Museum curators, enjoying prolonged communion with masterpieces out of unadulterated passion for their subject, may be the greatest hope for connoisseurship. (This is ironic, since museums did not exist when connoisseurship first developed, and were, in their infancy, exclusive playgrounds of wealthy would-be gentleman-connoisseurs before admitting the wide public that now populates them.)

There is hope, too, in the commercial arena now that the recession has purged spendthrift amateurs, recalibrated prices, and forced hidden treasures back into circulation, enabling connoisseur-collectors whose bank accounts remain intact to train their eye on what remains that is superlative. Perhaps now we can give credit to genuine connoisseurs, rather than to those whose sole accomplishment is to throw vast sums of money at art, only to be lauded as great collectors without ever taking the time to fathom their acquisitions. Theirs is legacy-building and status-seeking collecting, often relying entirely on another’s eye. Indeed, in the shadows behind many celebrated collectors is an unheralded connoisseur.

The Road Ahead

Connoisseurship aimed at establishing authorship and authenticity is not endangered (the market sustains those efforts in pursuit of profits). Rather, the threat is to that which aims to identify aesthetic quality in the belief that it can be ascertained and articulated and that greatness is rare and worth privileging. We produce more art than ever. In the words of philosopher Jean Baudrillard: “Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.” Connoisseurship helps, as Voltaire put it, “to perceive a flaw next to an embellishment” and thus disgorge.

In a recent interview, artist Jeff Koons captured the prevailing permissive attitude when he remarked, “Art requires you to bring nothing with it. Your own past history is perfect.” Yet we must surpass raw experiences of art (though legitimate) if we are to fully appreciate it (in the sense of understanding, versus enjoying) and heed Friedländer’s caveat that “a universal receptiveness carried to an extreme, leads to aesthetic Nihilism.” If we no longer receive classical educations or study iconography, we cannot grasp the rich symbolism, for example, of an Italian altarpiece, Dutch still life, or French conversation piece. We will think like a collector who recently quipped: “If there is a bunch of flowers on the wall, you walk by them and say, ‘That’s pretty,’ but that’s the end of it.” We will miss the profound aesthetic experience that Proust relished: “We have learned from [Jean-Baptiste] Chardin that a pear is as living as a woman, that an ordinary piece of pottery is as beautiful as a precious stone. The painter had proclaimed the divine equality of all the things before the mind that contemplates them, before the light that beautifies them.” It’s true that no one must be a connoisseur to enjoy art, but the more one learns, the more one experiences new dimensions of appreciation.

To those seeking to banish connoisseurship from nontraditional idea-based art, or any art, let’s throw down the gauntlet. Connoisseurship is concerned with physical qualities, but equally concerned with ideas and Voltaire’s “different shades of feeling.” Form and content are conjoined. “We use colors,” Chardin said, “but we paint with our feelings.” These days, people are enamored with novelty, as if traditional techniques have run their course. With notable exceptions (e.g., John Currin, Will Cotton, Ellen Altfest, Eric Fischl), technical mastery of a medium like painting is irrelevant to critically acclaimed art-making. In literature, words must form intelligible sentences, or the message is incoherent. The best writers deviate from rules of usage for aesthetic effect, yet master them to break them impactfully. The same is true for virtuoso musicians and five-star chefs: Their discordant notes and idiosyncratic ingredients flow from fundamentals. But painters no longer need to know how to mix pigments, layer glazes, or achieve chiaroscuro, sfumato, sprezzatura, and the like to gain recognition. Nor do sculptors need to master modeling, carving, constructing, or casting. Fewer artists “strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting…to the perfect blending of form and substance” once extolled by novelist Joseph Conrad. Connoisseurship thus outlasts the very elements of style it was originally designed to promulgate and critique, since it continues to perform an evaluative function, whatever the object of its gaze. It can bring us full circle, however, to age-old art forms in assessing the relative merits of new modes of expression.

Though conventional stylistic connoisseurship may founder in the face of new art forms, we must still judge form and substance if we care to differentiate among all that inundates our senses in this age of art proliferation. Adapting French critic Ferdinand Brunetière’s commentary on criticism, if connoisseurship “forgets” that an object is an object, and refrains from judgment, it is no longer connoisseurship, but “history and psychology.” With her groundbreaking Extreme Connoisseurship exhibition of conceptual art at the Harvard Art Museum in 2002, curator Linda Norden reminded us that, if we expect new objects to look familiar, we cannot fully appreciate them.

Connoisseurship, which is open to all who invest the time, must evolve. Without sacrificing close scrutiny of objects, it must be reconceived to admit new criteria by which to judge new visual evidence and adapt to the works it seeks to judge. Still, it must strive to identify that which rises above legendary connoisseur-dealer Bernard Berenson’s dreaded “fads, stampedes and hysterias of the moment.” Although Friedländer reminds us that “the boundary line between genius and talent has never been done quite successfully,” we must nevertheless try. Connoisseurship teaches us that fame does not equal greatness; artists rise as much by luck as talent. Quality lies equally in anonymity; the greatest feat for a connoisseur is to identify quality that bears no name.

Just as writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe conceived of destructive and productive criticism, the same is true of connoisseurship (ultimately a form of criticism): Connoisseurs can make perfunctory pronouncements of “good, better, best” as gospel, or they can answer meaningful questions about what an artist intended and how well he or she succeeded. The answers (right or wrong) will inspire new artistic dialogue and creation — ultimate proof that the language and art of connoisseurship are alive and well, poised to awaken the senses.

Carol Strone is an attorney and founder of Carol Strone Art Advisory, 29 East 64^th Street, 4C, New York, NY 10065, 212.879.2748, cstrone@csartadvisory.com

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