MICROSTORY OF ART ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM Salvator Mundi Scholarship in 2016

(12.12.2022) While others may look back at five years since the Christie’s sale, I am looking back at Salvator Mundi scholarship that I have done since 2016, and long before the Christie’s sale, which is an ominous date anyway. And there are a few things that have to be said here and now.

While Salvator Mundi scholarship, and I am considering myself a pioneer, has been worthwhile as an intellectual adventure, I have turned my back, more and more and due to disappointment and anger, to the academe, which seems to be lethargic, clueless and disinterested to me: in 2016 I had suggested to a professor to do a Salvator Mundi research project, with the result of getting no answer at all to that suggestion. I still went on to produce things on my own, with the initial impulse being the feeling of an overview lacking. And there are many Salvator Mundi versions, and after seven years of scholarship and research, I am hardly surprised by new versions coming up; while at the same time I see journalists confused, and seemingly lost in a confusion that journalism also helped to produce. And while the academe has remained as lethargically clueless as it always has been.
There are scholars that seem to think that they are above everything. But scholarship is built on the distinction of true and false. And no scholars are standing above of such ›trivialities‹. There are also scholars who chose to live inside a filter bubble, but denial of reality cannot be a basis of scholarship either. I see scholars wanting to monopolize a field to which they have contributed very little, and it seems generally that in Leonardo scholarship one can join without having to display any abilities at all.
I am wondering as to what degree scholars in the humanities actually do accept the distinction between true and false as a basis, because if any wild hallucination is as good as a solid reasoning, this would simply mean the end of scholarship. Because it would not be needed, and everyone could have his/her own truth. So I am thinking that ›anything goes‹, applied to everything (for example to questions of attribution) has gone too far. The distinction of true and false has to be newly established in the humanities, not in a rigid way, but in recalling that a solid reasoning produces better knowledge than wild hallucination, and that indeed some reasonings are better than others. Finally: Falsification does exist. And one should stop to confuse the mere ›challenging of something‹ with falsification. Because falsification is more. It is another level, and also another league. And if falsification rules out the possibility to further make certain claims, it should also be respected that some things simply have turned out to be wrong. But the culture of the humantities seems to be in such a catastrophic state that such reflections, as necessary as they might be, will remain unheard. Because academics have other worries: to reproduce themselves, to maintain themselves, and the result is a culture of self-referenciality that has reduced the scientific community to a sort of choir of soloists that do not even listen to each other anymore, because everyone seems only busy to secure a place for himself/herself, and to monopolize a field.
As worthwile scholarship does still seem to be to me – as disappointed (and also angry) I am, as to the spectacle of a largely clueless, disinterested and lethargic academic establishment.

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