My current book project, tentatively titled The Art of Judgment and the Judgment of Art, investigates the development and evolution of rubrics of aesthetic and economic judgment and valuation in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, and how those rubrics were put into play on various marketplaces.
I examine how these practices developed in tandem, on one hand, with European (especially Italian) markets for artwork and other luxury objects, and with the discourses of art theory and criticism that developed alongside those markets, on the other. I am interested in what these practices and discourses can reveal to us about changing concepts of value, community, and political economy. In this project, I use the history of connoisseurship and aesthetic judgment as a lens to examine the ever-changing relationship between aesthetic, economic, and ethical judgments from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries.
Cynthia Houng 