Teaching tomorrow’s curators how to spot a fake
“The art market is a seductive siren, but it’s also a minefield,” said Edouard Kopp on a sunny afternoon in the Harvard Art Museums’ Art Study Center amid a selection of the museums’ works on paper. It was sage advice for three Harvard graduate students and a curatorial fellow about to visit Paris for the world’s largest drawings fair, the Salon du Dessin, with the aim of identifying works to add to the museums’ collection. The discussion and the trip were part of a new workshop to teach future art scholars and curators how to navigate the tricky terrain of the fine art market. For a novice about to enter the fray, preparation is key. “There’s a lot of mystery surrounding acquisitions at museums,” said Laura Igoe, Harvard’s Maher Curatorial Fellow of American Art, who is hoping to land a curatorial position in a museum when her fellowship ends this spring. Igoe knows...