i’m watching an art theft documentary and they’re interviewing this art history professor from new york who was asked to go with the fbi to authenticate a rubens that had been stolen but it was a sting operation so they had to pretend like they weren’t the fbi, that they were some private buyer about to pay $3.5 million for it, and the fbi was like “this is a VERY delicate operation because you never know how they will react to what you have to say so let the agent do all of the talking, don’t say a word to anyone just nod if it’s the rubens, the last operation we did the guy in your position got shot because things went wrong in a second” and then it cuts to the professor’s interview and he says “i wasn’t going to fly down to miami to be a part of an undercover fbi sting operation to handle what could be rubens’s aurora and just NOT say anything. i was gonna have to ad lib a little” and then he tells the interviewer that when he & the fbi agent got to the hotel while he was examining the painting he started lecturing the other people, first on how badly they had wrapped it, and then about like how it had been painted, the history of it, what the subject was and what she was doing, etc etc, and he was like “i hadn’t taught a class on rubens in 15 years, so for me it was like being back in the classroom except my students couldn’t leave”
at one point during the deal the professor turned to the woman selling it and he said “isn’t this just the most beautiful rubens you’ve ever seen outside of a museum?” (because the fbi had told him earlier that this piece had been stolen from a museum) and THEN he said “where on earth did you get it from?” and the group of people the woman had with her was like taxidermy-fox.png but the woman was like “inheritance” can you IMAGINE the fbi agent about to have a fucking aneurysm when this random guy you’ve brought in just to nod if it’s the right painting not only starts giving an impromptu lecture but then he asks how they got it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B4Zm-Aa74Y&t=2613s
omg BLESS YOU for the link and the time stamp that was as glorious as described by the OP
Y’all failed to mention that HE posted the video HIMSELF and liked every single comment oh my god
I love art history professors. I would go to museums with mine and they would start chatting and the next thing you knew there was a crowd of people listening. Even better was that it would happen in those exhibits that are meant to bring in money and not for the scholarship and my professors were *not* kind about some parts of it. And then we went to another museum right afterward and the same two professors got lost (we went every year, and it’s not a big museum).
And then you have the art history professors who a) took us on a side trip during a visit to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History to see the Hope Diamond (we were there for a completely different exhibit) and b) took us to Fallingwater (the Frank Lloyd Wright house) and corrected the guides. And then compared stories afterwards and found out the guides said different things.
Also one of my art history professors wrote something about the aesthetics of Jello (he was one of the Hope Diamond/Fallingwater professors).
I swear art historians (at least the ones that taught me) are just… like that.
It takes a special kind of brain to become an art history professor.
