on connoisseurship
20 Jun 2012The other day someone posted this XKCD comic.
And I was like “ah yeah, that’s funny, but really reminiscent of this catandgirl comic. not sayin he ripped it off, or anything. just sayin’”.
And then I got to thinking about connoisseurship in general. Nothing could really beat these guys, right?
But then Max J Friedländer really takes the cake. He was like the original comic book guy – the steward and connoisseur of connoisseurship:
“If the determination of the authorship of an individual work of art most certainly is not the ultimate and highest task of artistic erudition; even if it were no path to the goal: nevertheless, without a doubt, it is a school for the eye, since there is no formulation of a question which forces us to penetrate so deeply the essence of an individual work as that concerning the identity of the author. The individual work, rightly understood, teaches us what a comprehensive knowledge universal artistic activity is incapable of teaching us.”
I’m a bit of an amateur connoisseurship connoisseur myself, you see.