Jeffrey Taylor
I currently serve as the US Fulbright Scholar at the European Humanities University, which is a humanities and arts-oriented university serving students from Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, and is located in Vilnius, Lithuania. I also continue to work as a partner at New York Art Forensics where I consult on issues of attribution and forgery in art.
Biography
I traveled to Eastern Europe in 1990 to be part of the first Peace Corps contingent in Hungary, in fact the first to ever serve in Europe. In 1998 I decided to start my own business to provide fine art shipping services to the growing art market in Budapest. MY clients, however, needed more than just transportation services: they needed an expert to guide them through the pitfalls and dangers of the highly unregulated international art market. Therefore, I also founded an advisory firm, Taylor Art Services, to meet the needs of collectors and the Trade. I earned Hungarian state appraisers licenses in Antique Furniture and Oriental Carpets, and am a Certified Appraiser of Impressionist and Modern Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, and Sculpture with the Appraisers Association of America. I received a PhD. in Comparative History at the Central European University in 2011. I wrote my dissertation on the history of the Hungarian art market, and that was subsequently published by Helena History Press in 2014 as: In Search of the Budapest Secession: The Artist Proletariat and Modernism's Rise on the Hungarian Art Market, 1800-1914.At Western Colorado University I lead the Master in Gallery & Museum Management, where I serve as the Program Director. I specifically teach courses on the art market, curatorship, connoisseurship, and art forensics. I performed much of the research for this current book, Visual Arts Management, while serving as the Leon Levy Fellow at the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Collection.
In my current professional activity I work on the problems of attribution and forgery as a partner in New York Art Forensics, an art forensics laboratory that we had initially founded when I taught at SUNY Purchase. We have subsequently moved it to Williamsburg, Brooklyn where it operates as an independent business. The lab has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and CNBC. I have spoken on the subject of art forgery at INTERPOL headquarters in Lyon, France, and have made press appearances that include: 60 Minutes, New York Times, CBC Radio, The Village Voice, FoxCT, CoDesign, Artsy, ArtGuide East, and New Republic.
Education
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PhD. Comparative History, Central European University
Areas of Research / Professional Expertise
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History and Functioning of the Art Market, Cultural Industries, Iconoclasm, Art Forgery, Art Forensics, Problems of the Art Market, Architecture and Urban Planning, Creative Industries and Creative Place-Making, Cultural Tourism
Personal Interests
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Improv theater, art exhibitions, dogs, cats, Dungeons & Dragons
Websites
Books
Articles
Art Forgers and the Deconstruction of Genius
Published: Aug 11, 2023 by Journal for Art Market Studies
Authors: Jeffrey Taylor
Subjects:
Sociology, Museum and Heritage Studies , Archaeology, Classical Studies, Art & Visual Culture
In this article, art forgers, and particularly their role in popular culture forms such as novels, films, and cartoons, present a critical counter-point to the cult of artistic genius. Their ability to successful mimic the work of canonical masters and fool collectors serves as a cautionary narrative for those who might accord too much authority to the experts govern these œuvres.
Art Markets without Art, Art without Objects
Published: Aug 11, 2023 by The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums, and Culture
Authors: Jeffrey Taylor, Kelsey Sloane
Subjects:
Web, Gaming, Media and Cultural Studies, Museum and Heritage Studies , Art & Visual Culture
The art world's transition to forms of liquid consumption in the crisis caused by Covid-19 is explored through the phenomenon of NFTs and the museum world's transition to more virtual programming.
Measuring Art Markets: The Colorado Art Market in 2017
Published: Sep 20, 2019 by Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts
Authors: Jeffrey Taylor, Mayela Cardenas, Stephanie Edwards
This paper represents the first stage in the development of new tools for the measuring of the art market by making use of US government data derived from tax and labor statistics, and by measuring the Colorado art market for the year 2017. It also establishes the methodology for measuring the entire US art market for the year 2018. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Research: Art Works grant will fund the report and release it in June 2020.
The roots of Regina Spektor’s post-Soviet poetics
Published: Nov 14, 2016 by East European Jewish Affairs
Authors: Jeffrey Taylor
Subjects:
Music, Language Learning, Religion, Area Studies, Critical & Creative Life Writing
Regina Spektor’s rigorous training in piano, starting in the Soviet Union and continued throughout her youth in the United States, helps to explain her skills in composing complex and unexpected pop music. Less obvious, though, will be an understanding of the roots of her poetic skills in writing lyrics. This paper examines how Spektor was influenced by Russian bard tradition, as well as the widespread informal music dissemination network known as magnitizdat.
Videos
Published: Aug 11, 2023
Jeff Taylor is the professor of gallery management and exhibit program at Western State Colorado University. He spoke with Alan about his experiences as an art appraiser and forgery sleuth.
Published: Aug 11, 2023
Jesse and Priscilla talk to art forensics expert, Dr. Jeffrey Taylor about some of the extremely talented artists who forge the world’s greatest works.
Published: Aug 11, 2023
Art historian Jeffrey Taylor on the documentation techniques in art forensics, types of paints and how can we use spectrum analysis to detect art forgeries.
Published: Nov 20, 2018
Forensic scientist Thiago Piwowarczyk and art historian Jeffrey Taylor PhD examine a purported Jackson Pollock painting and use their expertise to determine if the painting is legitimate or a forgery.
Published: Mar 19, 2019
Handheld XRF analyser X-MET8000 is a combination of being both non-destructive and capable of detecting all of the elements that are very important to understanding pigments in artworks. It allows New York Art Forensics to provide clients with certainty about when an artwork was made and goes beyond techniques of looking at brush strokes, styles and provenance. Find out more https://hha.hitachi-hightech.com/en/p...
Published: Feb 14, 2013
The 60 Minutes Episode on the art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi. I am interviewed about his ability to corrupt knowledge through constructing a fake provenance.
Published: Jul 20, 2017
In this episode of CNBC's Filthy Rich Guide they bring our New York Art Forensics laboratory a painting that is ostensibly by Vincent van Gogh. We examine it and give our opinion.