The Mystery of Connoisseurship

By John Camp

After looking seriously at many images over a long period of time, a person develops a sense of quality that is distinct from personal taste, or from "good taste," or from fashion or contemporary politics.

All of those issues are confusing, and is one reason why students and younger photographers and painters (and critics) swing so wildly from one style to another, as they are influenced by successive artistic discoveries.

The finest artists in the great styles (landscape, street, portrait, etc.) impress a personal aesthetic on their work, a genius in a certain kind  of perception. His or her techniques can be imitated, but the genius can't be—and the genius is what a connoisseur is looking for. For example, there are probably a million plein air painters in the U.S., but none of them are Monet....

If you look at enough images, for long enough, you begin to see that quality is everywhere, in every great style, and so is the crap. It is further confused by the fact that the same artist—Ansel Adams is a good example—can produce both masterpieces and rather lame potboilers. And that generally crappy photographers have, on occasion, produced something really extraordinary.

A couple of years ago a guy named Malcolm Gladwell published a book called Blink, in which he discusses the high quality of instant, instinctive, intuitive judgments about all kinds of complicated problems, including those of art connoisseurship. He talks about how a famous art guy hurried to (I think the Getty museum) to look at a recently acquired ancient Greek statue, and the instant he saw it, knew that it was fake—even after it had been certified by experts as a genuine masterpiece. Further tests proved him correct. He simply knew the subject so well that the quality he expected wasn't there in this object, and he knew it was wrong.

Blink actually has a lot to say about this kind of judgment, and how the mind works behind it. (The same guy wrote The Tipping Point.)

Not that there still aren't disagreements; but, generally, there is much broader agreement than disagreement on which artists are really good, and which individual pieces are genuinely masterpieces.

For me, the biggest problem is fashion. Back in the early '90s, I became attracted to the floral photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, and even paid several thousand dollars for a print. I still have it, and the print hasn't changed, but the longer I look at it, the more it seems to be...a little inane? We'll know more in twenty years or so, when the veils of fashion and politics have lifted a bit....

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John Camp is a journalist. This is his first post for TOP, although he has contributed many comments.

Comments

[Joe]

This is just a little off-topic, but one of the things I really like about Malcolm Gladwell (in both of those books as well as his articles in The New Yorker) is that, even when I disagree with him, I find him to be a very honest writer. He lays out his research and interviews and the thinking that leads to his conclusions. In fact, he has shown several times that he's open to changing him mind over time. (For example: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/technology/04online.ready.html )

He's naturally curious and that curiosity seems to drive his writing, rather than some arbitrary agenda.

[charlie d]

Well done John,

This dovetails nicely with the DP-1 review. One only has to read a couple forums to realize what marketing,intrigue, speculation and a bit of real desire can do. It seems many people bought the DP-1 out of at least a small sense of fashion and were quickly disappointed.

One also need not go far to find a connoisseurship of cameras, but I wonder how much of that is mere collecting?

Hold on to that print..........maybe store it away safely and pull it out in a couple years. You might be surprised buy your reaction as I doubt very much that you really bought it out of a sense of fashion/trendiness.

[hughlook]

Sorry to mention this book again, but Frank Kermode's wonderful essay "The patience of Shakespeare" suggests that what makes a classic is that one can return to it again and again and see new things in it and new possible interpretations. I think that's the Mapplethorpe problem - they aren't patient. I feel rather the same as John Camp does, only perhaps "sterile" rather than "inane", perhaps even "thin". I can, though, imagine someone else being fascinated by the forms of the flowers, the textures and finding them much more rewarding than I do. Ditto Ansel Adams. On the other hand, there are people like Klein or Winogrand, or Muzi Quawson whose pictures I can come back to often and soak more out of each time. "Connoisseurship" often doesn't allow for that, and its values become self-referential. Everything is judged in terms of how closely if conforms to an ideal template.

[david bennett]

Apropos not having time to make a wrong decision and having just enough time to make the right one, I recall reading that during the Second World War, when they were training civil defence people to identify enemy 'planes, they could not improve the success rate no matter how much time they gave the observers.

But when they cut the available time in which observers had to identify the 'planes, the success rate improved even when the observers had only fractions of a second in which to decide.