This blog is about my search to uncover the truth about a painting. It is a mystery, a travelogue across time and place, and a memoir about life and art, museums and curation. It is a meditation about authenticity and power.
It’s also about how researchers create knowledge, and how the digital world is changing that. Where once researchers had to rely on published source materials or archival research (only feasible for those with research budgets and time), there’s now a brave new world of digitized source material. You can spend the morning in the Paris city archives without leaving your office. Documents that used to be buried in basement storage shelves thousands of miles away are now a click away.
This blog exists because I am able to research the century-old history of a French painting from my study in a California suburb, in between my work as a lecturer and a program coordinator for the Johns Hopkins MA in Museum Studies, my dog-walking duties to Jasper, and thinking about what to cook for dinner tonight. I am sharing my research with you here because this is what I have time to do: dole out short portions of a larger project, with the idea that it will aggregate into a full meal of a story. Maybe you will know something to add, have a little seasoning or even an additional course. Because that’s the other thing about this new digital world: we can all talk to each other. We are all standing around in the same virtual kitchen, adding to the communal recipe of knowledge. Welcome to my kitchen.
And this blog exists because I want to tell you a story.
