The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [112]
So were his peers.
TO WALK THROUGH an art museum with an expert is humbling, like trying to keep up with a pro on the tennis court. The judgments seem so sure and automatic—so much, indeed, like recognizing your spouse—that it is easy to see how quickly you could fall victim to the delusion that your opinions were more akin to revelations, as if the muse of art herself had whispered in your ear.
Malcolm Gladwell began his book Blink, about the power of snap judgments, with a story about Thomas Hoving. In the early 1980s, the Getty Museum was considering buying a marble statue called a kouros, a depiction of a nude male. The statue was 2,600 years old, the price nearly $10 million. Before they agreed to buy the kouros, the Getty spent fourteen months investigating it. Lawyers scrutinized its provenance, which was impeccable and stretched back Decades. A University of California geologist analyzed a sample of the marble with an electron microscope and other sophisticated tools. Everything checked out. The geologist managed to identify the particular quarry the stone had come from, and he found that the statue’s surface was covered with a thin layer of a material called calcite, which forms naturally on the surface of marble over the course of hundreds or thousands of years. This statue was old.
The connoisseurs weren’t so sure. An art historian named Federico Zeri thought the statue looked wrong, though he wasn’t sure just what the problem was. An expert on Greek sculpture named Evelyn Harrison agreed with Zeri. Then came Hoving’s turn. A Getty official showed him the statue.
“Have you paid for this?” Hoving asked.
No reply.
“If you have, try to get your money back. If you haven’t, don’t.”
In the end, the Getty went ahead with its purchase. The statue turned out to be a fake, made not in 600 BC but around 1980. The connoisseurs and curators had seen at a glance what the scientists had failed to find in more than a year.
IT IS EASY to draw the wrong moral from the Getty story. The point is not that soulless scientific tests always fall short of human judgments, in the way that frozen food always falls short of a home-cooked dinner. Nor is there anything mystical about the talent of Hoving or the others, though it can seem that way. Hoving can spot a fake in seconds because he has invested tens of thousands of hours in examining works of art. Did it take him two seconds to make up his mind about the kouros, or two Decades?
Connoisseurs have brought some of the confusion on themselves. They are rationalists who talk like revivalists. Whistler claimed that he could tell whether a Velasquez was genuine because “I always swoon when I see a Velasquez.” In truth, swooning has nothing to do with it. Identifying a Velasquez or a Vermeer is an intellectual task, not an emotional one. Making a decision about a new painting involves the same kind of pattern-recognizing skills that let us recognize a man we last saw twenty years ago, when he weighed thirty pounds less and had hair to his shoulders. It may sound like divine inspiration, but the expert’s cry of “Fake!” is a rational judgment.
As if to make matters worse, connoisseurs talk incessantly about their eye, which makes it sound as if they have an inborn gift akin to perfect pitch. They don’t. An “ear” is innate*; an “eye” is testament to long practice, like an athlete’s muscles. Hoving put together a book called Master Pieces that shows just how much practice is involved. The book is based on a game that art curators play—given only a photo of a tiny snippet of a painting and a verbal hint, can you identify the painting? Hoving played for years. He is the least laid-back of men, and this was not idle chat but competitive sport. Even looking at paintings, Hoving believes, is best done “fiercely.”