In case you wanted a little background on our hero, the story of his life, the source of his powers, here it is.
Art Guy was conceived in the Brooklyn Museum on the table of Judy Chicago's A Dinner Party. He was born on a cheap ferry from New York to Paris, and thus emerged into this world an expat bohemian. By the age of 6, little Guy was a troublemaker when it came to visual analysis. Once in the Tuilleries, when prompted by his mother and father, "I spy something red," he said, "the sky." Confused, they took him in for counseling. There little Guy admitted he had seen The Absinthe Drinker by Degas and read the color theory of Kandinsky in the same day. Inspired, he had found a bar on Sainte-Germaine des Pres that served the drink and imbibed enough for his visual input to be overwhelmed by the aesthetics of emotion, in which state he returned to his parents at the garden. Because of this incident Art Guy was mistakenly diagnosed with a super-power: the sixth sense of connoisseurship. It was only later, during our hero's early teen years, that he dismissed this superpower on the grounds that a sixth sense of connoisseurship is a load of Berensonian crap.
Art Guy spent his college years very confused. Is post-structuralism a good thing or a bad thing? Is it important that artwork be pretty? If oil and tempera were to duke it out, who would win? Fortunately Art Guy discovered that drinking with his good friend Gus in a bar downtown put these unanswerables on hold and generally led to amateur judgments of quality: Simone Martini, top of the line. Bartolo di Fredi lagging behind. See a Courbet - makes your day. Late Renoir - gone too far. Jeff Koons, go play spoons. Late academy, never had me.
These important ideas were published and became fundamental theory by the late 1970's, by which time Art Guy possessed a number of doctorates and had accumulated enough research grants to last him and his ego a lifetime's worth of airplane tickets to the medieval world.
Drawing on the rhetoric of John Lowden, allow me to construct the rest of our hero's story as a hagiography. That means the life of a saint.
In a miraculous trip to Chartres Cathedral, our hero knew everything. Word of this miracle spread to the art historical circle in Vienna, all of whom doubted until one historian looked up and saw that Art Guy had apparated into their seminar hall. Art Guy, on his travels through Byzantium, enlightened the birds and the squirrels to the iconoclastic controversy, evidence of which can be found in the icons patronized by squirrels in parts of Georgia and Crete. In the mid-1970's our hero raised worldwide interest in Pre-Raphaelite paintings from the dead. And once, when a dragon challenged him on his knowledge of Cistercian and Dominican architectural statutes in a symposium, he slayed the dragon and defended the field of architectural history.
In the awakening from a dream in the last scene of the hagiography of Art Guy in Jeans, we find that he is a regular guy at age 22 doing his best to be guided by the art of the past. He gives it a critical eye and tries his hand at theory but really does best looking at specific artworks in their social context. He's slowly learning to study art just for the sake of studying art. It's not a superpower, it's more like an ancient technique you learn from years of training in a pagoda somewhere. Still working on that travel grant.
