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Hannah's avatar

Fabulous read! I have every book but Moser. That will be going on my Christmas list! In January of this year, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a wonderful exhibition called “World Made Wondrous,” which recreated a Dutch collector’s cabinet to examine the political and colonial histories of European collecting practices in the 17th century.

The “thesis” was that as Europeans assembled their curiosity cabinets, they ordered the world in deliberate ways and asserted judgments and hierarchies on the value of natural materials, labor, craftsmanship, and human worth. It was absolutely fascinating and certainly one of the most well executed exhibits I’ve ever seen.

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Howard Lewis's avatar

One of the finest books on art runs on a parallel path to your own so I would highly recommend Duveen by SN Behrmann, who was actually a journalist for The New Yorker. His pithy, gossipy account of Joseph Duveen, arguably the greatest art dealer of all time, brilliantly captures the caprice of the man and his age. In his pomp, roughly 1895-1935, Duveen had virtually every tycoon you can think of in his pocket. His masterstroke was realising at the turn of the last century that America was full of money but no art whereas Europe was full of art but no money!

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