by Jon Lackman | 15 September 2006 | Journals
In a recent Oxford Art Journal (29.2), Harry Mount writes: “In 1728 Ephraim Chambers noted the recent appearance in English of a new word, ‘connoisseur’, which he defined as meaning ‘a Critick, or a Person who is a thorow Judge, or Master in any way; in Matters of Painting, &c.’ For many historians, the rise of the connoisseur is one of the distinctive features of British eighteenth-century culture. According to this interpretation, the rigorous approach of the connoisseur replaced an older, more indiscriminate attitude to collecting usually referred to as ‘curiosity’, and attributed to a character called a ‘virtuoso’ … The extent to which this supposedly pivotal shift from the virtuoso to the connoisseur actually took place must, however, be questioned.”
Satish Padiyar, revewing Gavin Butt’s Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963 in the same issue, writes: “Recent research in the social sciences has revealed that two-thirds of our conversation is taken up with gossip. It becomes then a curious fact that this ‘low’ discursive practice remains either the un-thought philosophical discourse, or is considered to be its undoing (for Heidegger, we are told, gossip amounts to ‘perverting the act of disclosing’ the truth). And as for the repudiations of philosophical discourse, so it is with art-historical discourse. In Between You and Me, Gavin Butt wants to set the record straight. What happens to art-historical accounts, he asks, when gossip is admitted therein, as if by contamination? Addressing this question, the book constitutes an important and ambitious self-proclaimed challenge to the ways we do art history in the academy. It does so in a tone that is frequently witty, playful and irreverent, which is to say ‘queer’.”
