John Brewer's research interests have focused on two areas: issues of value in the visual-art world and questions of travel, tourism, identity, and place.

He has had a long-standing interest in the fraught relationship between culture and money, on which he has written extensively during his career. Starting with the assumption that the art world is dominated by a shared struggle over value, ownership, and the meaning of art, Brewer examines questions such as: What makes a work of art great? What makes it valuable? Is it genuine or a fake? To whom does it belong—an individual owner, a culture, a nation, or humanity? Artists, scholars, curators, patrons, collectors, dealers, and even the public have their own answers to these questions. Brewer has studied these debates and their participants over the last five centuries.

Part of this project appeared as The American Leonardo: A Tale of Obsession, Art, and Money (Oxford University Press, 2009), but he continued to pursue this topic through an investigation of the place of curators in fine-art museums and their complex relations with art scientists and conservators, as well as their struggle to retain their integrity in a world increasingly dominated by market

... Read More