In four years, Kauno kolegija Higher Education Institution (HEI) will apply to become a university of applied sciences, so the scientific potential of the higher education institution is being consistently strengthened. This year, new researchers joined the Kauno kolegija HEI, who will contribute to the development and expansion of this field.
One of these researchers is Dr Jeffrey Taylor, who is an expert in the history and functioning of the art market. He has taught at universities in Europe and the United States, most recently serving as a Fulbright Scholar to Lithuania.
Author of many peer-reviewed articles and three books
Dr J. Taylor, who recently joined the team of the Faculty of Arts and Education has a long experience in living and teaching in Central/Eastern Europe from the time he went to teach English for the US Peace Corps in Hungary. Later he founded a transportation business in Budapest to source and ship art and antiques from the region. He has also previously been the Leon Levy Fellow at the Frick Collection/Frick Art Resource Library in New York, and he has been recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Research ArtWorks grant to study the US art market.
He is the author of many peer-reviewed articles and three books, the most recent is The Art Business: Art World, Art Market, published by Routledge for their Discovering the Creative Industries series. He also works professionally as a partner at New York Art Forensics, a laboratory in Brooklyn devoted to studying art works scientifically to determine authenticity and attribution.
From keynote speaker to a faculty member
The first time Dr J. Taylor got to know Kauno kolegija HEI was in 2023 at the Art, Design, Languages, Education and Social Work (ADLES) conference where he came to give a keynote lecture on the topic of “Knowledge in Art and Its Corruption.”
‘It’s a lecture that I do on the topic of art forgery and how it works. At lunch I got to know the colleagues of the school, and I was impressed by their professionalism and ambition, especially their goal to elevate their institution into a university. That’s when I heard that they were looking for academics who do research, and, being that I’d already developed a positive impression of Kaunas and of Lithuania, I thought this could be a wonderful community to work in,’ shares Dr J. Taylor.
Dr J. Taylor is an associate professor within the Academy of Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Education. ‘I especially teach courses in the Creative Industries, for example Entrepreneurship and Market Analysis,’ he says.
Dr J. Taylor shares that a big part of his role at Kauno kolegija HEI is to do research and reveals that he is currently working on an article on the history of art fairs.
‘For the long-term, I am preparing a research project to develop an application for crowd-sourced art criticism to test the possibility of democratising the taste-making function. In May, we’ll be hosting an Art Forensics workshop with the Restoration Programme. We’ve received funding from the Baltic-American Freedom Fund, to bring my business partner, Thiago Piwowarczyk over to do this workshop at Kauno kolegija HEI and then we’ll also do it at the Estonian Academy of Art in Tallinn,’ reveals Dr J. Taylor.
While sharing his impressions about Lithuania, Dr J. Taylor says that he really enjoyed his time in Lithuania, so much so that he has decided to make it home.
‘Before I came to Lithuania to teach on Fulbright, I’d only been here once, a long time ago, when I worked for an NGO in Budapest, and we had a project in Lithuania. I always remembered it fondly, though, and so I was excited to come back for a longer time, when I came in 2022, and now it looks like I’ll be here much longer,’ shares Dr J. Taylor.
