The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and Its Linked Phenomena

A cultural and social history of art collecting, art history, and the art market

In The Rare Art Traditions, Joseph Alsop offers a wide-ranging cultural and social history of art collecting, art history, and the art market. He argues that art collecting is the basic element in a remarkably complex and historically rare behavioral system, which includes the historical study of art, the market for buying and selling art, museums, forgery, and the astonishing prices commanded by some works of a...