Archive for August, 2021

“How could it be found?” declares Mademoiselle De Lune. “It was never lost.”

This self-portrait conveys a world-weary soul with a still integrated ear.

I’d heard the quaint whispers: “They found Van Gogh’s ear.” Heard they found an ear – funny stuff. But this improbable discovery was no laughing matter. Rumors were rife and flew around like so much paint onto a Jackson Pollock canvass –  that the fabled ear of perhaps the art world’s most influential Impressionist had been found. These rumors did not demonstrate explicitly that the ear had been found, but created an impression that the ear had been found. Was this just an eerie case of life imitating art?

To dispel this absurd rumor required some sly sleuthing. Only then could it be relegated to the clickbait trash heap of e-history. But what if it wasn’t dispel-able. What if this cockamamie tale was true? It would turn the art world on its…oh what’s the word?

And that’s where I enter the painting. My name is Dr. Ellison Archibald Jones (of the Canterbury Jones’s) and I’m an untouchably tenured Art History professor at Balliol College at Oxford University in England. My lofty perch in academia allows me to indulge my deepest passion – locating, retrieving and otherwise restoring lost appendages to dis-armed or defaced sculptures.

Balliol College had always been very generous in rewarding me with sabbaticals due in large part to my prodigious fundraising skills and my popularity among art patrons. My recently published book Art: The 4^th R, has added to my fame and is now in its 3^rd printing (the first two printings being smudged).

To convey a sense of my expertise and qualifications in spearheading this caper, I’ve provided a brief résumé of my achievements: Read the rest of this entry »