The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [63]
Such knowledge is real. It seems esoteric, but that is only because few of us spend our days contemplating literature or art. Every one of us makes “expert” judgments every day, too many to count. When you identify your father’s voice from a single word over a crackly phone line or recognize your sister’s walk by the funny way she swings her arms, even in dim light and from a block away, you are exercising precisely the skills of a connoisseur who glances at a painting and immediately says “Vermeer” or “second-rate.”
We have seen already that experts can mistake a close copy for the real thing—for that matter, that girl with the funny walk might turn out to be a stranger and not your sister at all. For a forger with colossal talent, the close-copy strategy might be the best way to go. And Van Meegeren, whose skills were adequate but not stellar, did fool renowned experts with barely modified “Vermeers.” But trying to palm off a close copy carried great risks.
The first was straightforward. Van Meegeren did not have Vermeer’s talent. Of the billions of humans who have come and gone, very few have. By some magic of hand-eye coordination or psychological insight or who knows what, Vermeer could do what others cannot. For museumgoers who want only to gaze and marvel, that is not a problem, any more than it was a problem for ballet lovers to sit in a concert hall and watch Baryshnikov leap across the stage. But pity the dancer who tried to duplicate Baryshnikov’s performance, bursting from the wings only a yard behind him and stepping, stepping, leaping just as he had done.
The second problem with the close-copy strategy was subtler, and it applied not only to Van Meegeren but to forgers generally. The closer a forger comes to getting an imitation exactly right, the more the experts grow uneasy, even though they almost certainly cannot articulate what the trouble is.
Curiously, the best analysis of the forger’s dilemma comes not from the world of fine art but from the realm of robot design and video graphics. The writer Clive Thompson spelled out the problem in a brilliant article called “Why Realistic Graphics Make Humans Look Creepy.” “In 1978,” Thompson wrote, “the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori noticed something interesting: The more humanlike his robots became, the more people were attracted to them, but only up to a point. If an android became too realistic and lifelike, suddenly people were repelled and disgusted.”
People liked R2-D2 and C-3PO. No one cared that they looked as much like vacuum cleaners as like human beings. To be 50 percent humanlike was fine. “But when a robot becomes ninety-nine percent lifelike,” Thompson went on, “so close that it’s almost real, we focus on the missing one percent.” Something about the skin strikes us as wrong; the dead eyes make us cringe; the herky-jerky movements turn us off. The once-appealing robot suddenly looks like a mechanized zombie. “Our warm feelings, which had been rising the more vivid the robot became, abruptly plunge downward. Mori called this plunge ‘the Uncanny Valley,’ the paradoxical point at which a simulation of life becomes so good it’s bad.”
Van Meegeren had never heard of robots, but he had stumbled on the same insight as the Japanese scientist. At some point he realized that if he tried to fool connoisseurs with a near-twin of a real Vermeer, he, too, might fall into the Uncanny Valley. Every human is an expert on what real faces and bodies look like, and when something is close but not quite, we know it immediately, and we recoil. Connoisseurs are experts on paintings, and they, too, instinctively recoil from near-misses.
For would-be forgers, the Uncanny Valley concealed an additional, though closely related, danger. It