Connoisseurship and the stakes of style

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 1-26

  Neer, Richard ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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EID: 34249424454     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/498001     Document Type: Review

References (87)

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence," The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, trans. Michael B. Smith, ed. Galen Johnson (Evanston, Ill., 1993), p. 103
2. See The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang (1979; Ithaca, N.Y, 1987), which remains the best treatment
3. see also The Uses of Style in Archaeology, ed. Margaret Conkey and Christine Hastorf (Cambridge, 1990)
4. and The Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts, ed. Caroline van Eck, James McAllister, and Renée van de Vall (Cambridge, 1995)
5. The classic treatment of the subject in art history is Meyer Schapiro, "Style," Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (New York, 1994), pp. 51-102
6. On the term style, see Willibald Saurländer, "From Stilus to Style: Reflections on the Fate of a Notion," Art History 6 (Sept. 1983) : 253-70
7. See Jonathan Gilmore, The life of a Style: Beginnings and Endings in the Narrative History of Art (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000)
8. and "Problems in Connoisseurship," a special issue of Source 24, no. 2 (2005) for recent treatments that, it is hoped, signal renewed interest in the subject
9. This last view (connoisseurship as fetishism) is sometimes attributed to Derrida's essay, "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing" - the single best discussion of connoisseurship in recent memory. It is true that Derrida does associate attribution with the fetishist's desire for plenitude, hence gratification. But that association is only half his argument. More important for present purposes is the association of connoisseurship's dismissal with historical crime and the conclusion of the discussion with a simple es gibt / il y' a. See Jacques Derrida, "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing," Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, 1987), pp. 329-30,371
10. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis, 1996), p. 90
11. See Richard Neer, Style and Politics in Athenian Vase-Painting: The Craft of Democracy, ca. 530-460 B.C.E. (Cambridge, 2002)
12. On criteria in this Wittgensteinian sense, see Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford, 1979), pp. 3-48; hereafter abbreviated CR. He describes "criteria as necessary before the identification or knowledge of an object, and as prelude to that knowledge" (CR, p. 17)
13. A point recently emphasized by Irene Winter, "Establishing Group Boundaries: Toward Methodological Refinement in the Determination of Sets as a Prior Condition to the Analysis of Cultural Contact and/or Innovation in First Millennium B.C.E. Ivory Carving," in Crafts and Images in Contact: Studies on Eastern Mediterranean Art of the First Millennium B.C.E., ed. C. E. Suter and C. Uehlinger (Freiburg, 2005), pp. 23-42
14. Well treated in David Phillips, Exhibiting Authenticity (New York, 1997)
15. Carlo Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (London, 2000), p.xxiv
16. On the history of the Getty kouros, see Marion True, "The Getty Kouros: Background of the Problem," in The Getty Kouros Colloquium (Athens, 1993), pp. 11-15
17. On the problem of forged documentation in historical inquiry, see Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, N.J., 1990)
18. More recently, see the treatment of similar cases in Elizabeth Simpson, "Tall Tales: Celts, Connoisseurs, and the Fabrication of Archaeological Context," Source 24, no. 2 (2005): 28-41
19. Kenneth D. S. Lapatin, "Proof? The Case of the Getty Kouros," Source 20 (Fall 2000) : 51
20. See the excellent discussion in Ginzburg, "Lorenzo Valla on the 'Donation of Constantine,'" History, Rhetoric, and Proof (Hanover, N.H., 1999), pp. 54-70
21. See Kendall L. Walton, "Style and the Products and Processes of Art," in The Concept of Style, p. 73
22. See also Arthur Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 80-81, 89 on the determination of evidence
23. Compare Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 31-32, 42, 48, on the possibility of a random spattering of paint producing a simulacrum of the Polish Riderin the Frick Collection
24. Immanuel Kant, Kritik of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (London, 1892), §43, p. 183
25. The interest of the Berekhat Ram figurine has been discussed most thoroughly in Whitney Davis, Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis (University Park, Pa., 1996), pp. 157-60
26. For a related discussion, see James Elkins, Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing (New York, 2000), pp. 62-102
27. See a more recent account of a similar case in Nicholas Conard, "Paleolithic Ivory Sculptures from Southwestern Germany and the Origins of Figurative Art," Nature, 18 Dec. 2003, pp. 830-32, a reference I owe to Jim Porter
28. See George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, Conn., 1962)
29. Charles Saunders Peirce, Pragmatism and Pragmaticism, vol. 5 of Collected Papers of Charles Saunders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 2 vols, in 1 (1934; Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 411,412, §589
30. A similar metaphorics of ground, groundedness, and the groundless underwrites the famous Heidegger-Schapiro-Derrida exchange on attribution and restitution; see, for instance, Derrida, The Truth in Painting, pp. 287-92. Heidegger's insistence, echoed by Derrida, that the discourse of attribution is not simply grounded or groundless - not simply the subjectivization of the world, a transformation of hypokeimenon into subjectum - is located at just this topos
31. I refer here to the so-called Typology Debate between James Ford and Albert Spaulding, "the first substantial manifestation of the concern of American archaeologists to articulate and make explicit the analytical basis of their discipline" (Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought [Cambridge, 1989], p. 203)
32. Michael Shanks, Classical Archaeology of Greece: Experiences of the Discipline (London, 1996), p. 36
33. Compare Fred Orton, "Northumbrian Sculpture (the Ruthwell and Bewcastle Monuments): Questions of Difference," in Northumbria's Golden Age, ed. Jane Hawkes and Susan Mills (New York, 1999), pp. 216-26
34. and "Rethinking the Ruthwell and Bewcastle Monuments: Some Strictures on Similarity; Some Questions of History," in Theorizing Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, ed. Catherine Karkov and Orton (Morgantown, W.Va., 2003), pp. 65-92 for a more moderate version of this position. Like the old Ford-Spaulding debate, these avowedly postmodern critiques retain, willy-nilly, the basic distinction between emic and etic categories. The gist of the critique is invariably that archaeology naturalizes its own etic categories as real, historical, emic ones. It is difficult to understand what other sorts of category archaeologists are supposed to use; what might be called the emic category an sich proves to be elusive
35. Shanks, "Style and the Design of a Perfume Jar from an Archaic Greek City State," Journal of European Archaeology 1 (Spring 1993): 77
36. see Shanks, Art and the Greek City State (Cambridge, 1999)
37. On pastness and skepticism, see the discussion in Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History, chaps. 5 and 6
38. See Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 2d. ed. (Princeton, N.J., 1961), pp. 19-20
39. and In Search of Cultural History (Oxford, 1969)
40. and Ginzburg, "Style as Inclusion, Style as Exclusion," Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York, 1998), pp. 28-54
41. See Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York, 1992)
42. See Richard Wollheim, "Pictorial Style: Two Views," in The Concept of Style, pp. 183-202
43. and "Style in Painting," in The Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts, pp. 37-49
44. The distinction itself goes back to Wölfflin, who provides an innovative and unusually cogent analysis. See Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (London, 1932)
45. Here it is important to specify that not everything that is stylistic is also etiological. Saying that something is baroque suggests nothing about its origins. A Pergamene relief or a painting by David Reed can each be baroque, and a fake Tiepolo is, potentially, just as baroque as a real one. Likewise, not everything about a painting that has etiological significance is also stylistic. The collector's stamp that appears on a Rembrandt drawing may be an important clue as to provenance and thus as to the authenticity of the work; but it is not a stylistic trait for all that. On Reed, see Going for Baroque: Eighteen Contemporary Artists Fascinated with the Baroque, ed. Lisa Corrin and Joaneath Spicer (Baltimore, 1995)
46. On the contemporary neobaroque, see Résurgences baroques: les Trajectoires d'un processus transculturel, ed. Walter Moser and Nicolas Goyer (Brussels, 2001)
47. and Gregg Lambert, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (New York, 2004)
48. On collector's stamps and the apparatus of attribution, see Philips, Exhibiting Authenticity
49. For a recent, compelling argument to the effect that supraindividual styles may be identified in cases where the posited stylistic connection explains why individual artists "have the same brief," see Gilmore, The life of a Style, p. 55
50. The term comes from Robin Osborne, Archaic and Classical Greek Art (New York, 1998), chap. 1
51. For those unfamiliar with Smithson's art, one way to think of it is as the literalization of the Naturgeschichte of Adorno and Benjamin. On which, see Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin's Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley, 1998)
52. Robert Smithson, "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects," Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley, 1996), p. 100
53. On Bacon, art, and natural history, see Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art, and Technology, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton, N.J., 1995), pp. 63-80
54. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, 1976), p. 102; hereafter abbreviated LA
55. On indiscernibles, see also the classic account in Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, chap. 1
56. See Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, and Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton, N.J., 1987), pp. 89-96
57. Compare Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York, 1958), p. 199, for the same basic argument in very compact form; hereafter abbreviated PI
58. On aspects, see, among others, Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (London, 1990)
59. Contra Goodman, see, for example, Louise Morton and Thomas Foster, "Goodman, Forgery, and the Aesthetic," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49 (Spring 1991): 155-59
60. See Mulhall, On Being in the World, pp. 15-28, on continuous aspect-perception and "regarding-as."
61. Wittgenstein, The Blue and the Brown Books (New York, 1958) ,pp. 164-65
62. Incidentally, reading Goodman in these Wittgensteinian terms tends to vitiate the critiques leveled against him in Morton and Foster, "Goodman, Forgery, and the Aesthetic."
63. See Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago, 1990), pp. 64-100
64. and Sauren Teghrarian, "Wittgenstein, Kripke, and the 'Paradox' of Meaning," in Wittgenstein and Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Teghrarian (Bristol, 1994)
65. both contra Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition (Cambridge, Mass., 1982)
66. For example, see Giovanni Morelli, Die Galerien Borghese und Dora Panfili in Rom, vol. 1 of Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei (Leipzig, 1890)
67. Morelli may, in fact, have been too conscientious; Hayden Macginnis, "The Role of Perceptual Learning in Connoisseurship: Morelli, Berenson, and Beyond," ArtHistory l3 (Mar. 1990): 104-17, argues that he wound up misrepresenting his actual practice
68. On Morelli, see Giovanni Morelli e la cultura dei conoscitori, ed. G. Agosti et al., 3 vols. (Bergamo, 1993)
69. See Schapiro, "Style," pp. 53-56
70. For example, see John Davidson Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase Painters (Oxford, 1963)
71. On Beazley, see most recently Phillipe Rouet, Approaches to the Study of Attic Vases: Beazley and Pottier (Oxford, 2001)
72. On the connoisseurship of Rembrandt, see Hubertus von Sonnenburg et al., Rembrandt / Not Rembrandt in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Aspects of Connoisseurship (New York, 1995)
73. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, trans. Anscombe, ed. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1980), 2:13, §63
74. On the role of quality in attribution, see Neer, "Beazley and the Language of Connoisseurship," Hephaistos 15 (1997): 7-30
75. Kant, Kritik of Judgment, §6, p. 56; trans, mod
76. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge, 1969), p. 77
77. The private language argument is generally taken to appear at PI, §§243-315, pp. 88-89. But see Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private language
78. For the public nature of aspect-perceptions - the fact that they demand some form of expression, a "cry of recognition" - see PI, p. 198
79. Compare PI, p. 183: "Thus the atmosphere that is inseparable from its object - is not an atmosphere," that is, is not an ethereal, geistig ideality; there is an intersection here between Wittgenstein and Benjamin's account of the aura, literally the "breeze." See also Merleau-Ponty, "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence," p. 104: "The presence of style ... is one with the fact of our corporeality and does not call for any occult explanation." Within the domain of art history (or, more precisely, at its margins) the most extensive employment of the Smithsonian theme is Adrian Stokes's Stones of Rimini
80. "The kind of certainty is the kind of language-game" (PI, p. 224)
81. See Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, N.C., 2002)
82. For recent accounts of recognition in Hegel, see Robert Williams, Hegel's Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley, 1997)
83. See Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), p. 94
84. See also CR, pp. 358-59
85. Compare Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? pp. 86-96. One can, for instance, argue about the internal consistency of connoisseur's arguments: does Beazley, for instance, make a coherent argument for why he applies the criteria he does? I have argued that he does not in Neer, "Beazley and the Language of Connoisseurship."
86. For a recent, related critique of visual culture, see W. J. T. Mitchell, "Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture," in Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Studies, ed. Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (Williamstown, Mass., 2002), pp. 231-50
87. A point made in Davis, Replications, p. 182