Connoisseurs and Conmen : The Contest for Cultural Authority in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

This book examines the art collector and trickster John Hilditch’s struggle to become a renowned collector and expert in early twentieth-century Britain. Through his life it explores how cultural authority was constructed, challenged and forged during a period of social, cultural and political democratisation. -- .

This book examines John Hilditch (1872-1930), a notorious collector of Chinese art who lied, hoaxed and manipulated in his struggle against museum experts to become a cultural authority. Previously overlooked as a pest with a dubious collection, this book uses Hilditch to interrogate how far the monumental social, cultural and political changes of the early twentieth century unsettled social and cultural hierarchies and how these hierarchies were remade. It shows how the cultural elites were forced to engage with the public and re-draw the boundaries of citizenship, expertise and high and low culture in response to unprecedented social mobility, the democratisation of culture and politics, as well as the effects of British imperialism which brought ordinary Britons access to antiquities as well as confidence to claim expertise over foreign cultures. The book will interest social and cultural historians of Modern Britain, museum scholars and art historians. -- .