First Person: Snap Judgments
Instant analysis by experts is often right—except when it’s not
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Well-ensconced on the nonfiction best-seller list, Blink, by New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, recounts how experienced connoisseurs were able, in the blink of an eye, to evaluate the famous Getty kouros—and declare it a forgery!
A kouros is a nude statue of a Greek youth standing with his arms at his side with one leg forward. One expert, when told the Getty museum was about to buy the kouros, replied, “I’m sorry to hear that.” Another expert, when he first saw it, felt cold. Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, said that the first word that came to mind when he saw the statue was “fresh.”
These connoisseurs, in Gladwell’s words, “took a look at that statue and some part of their brain did a series of instant calculations, and before any kind of conscious thought took place, they felt something … Did they know why they knew? Not at all. But they knew.”
For author Gladwell, the instant reactions of experts like these was enough—the statue was “so obviously fake.” The Getty isn’t so sure, however. There are expert connoisseurs on the other side, and the Getty has spent millions on scientific tests of the statue. The question remains open. When it is exhibited—and it is scheduled to go on display again this fall when the Getty’s new exhibit halls are to be opened—it will bear a label stating that it is either “about 530 B.C., or modern forgery.”
Gladwell opens with the case of the Getty kouros. In the last example in his book, he turns to music: “Trained classical musicians say that they can tell whether a player is good or not almost instantly—sometimes in just the first few bars, sometimes even with just the first note … It was an article of faith that one of the things that made a music expert a music expert was that he could listen to music played under any circumstances and gauge, instantly and objectively, the quality of the performance.” Just like the connoisseurs who were able to judge the Getty kouros in an instant, in a blink.
Rainer Kuechl, the concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic, once said, as Gladwell informs us, that he could instantly tell the difference with his eyes closed between a male and female violinist; with his trained ear, he could pick up the softness and flexibility of the “female style.” With a trombone, of course, it was even easier. The members of the Munich Philharmonic once claimed of the orchestra’s female trombonist that her “shortness of breath was overhearable” in the famous trombone solo of Mozart’s Requiem.
Since the 1970s, however, a revolution has occurred in musical auditions: The screen has been introduced, so that the judges can’t see the player. And the musicians are identified not by name, but by number. Since the introduction of the screen, the 067number of women in top U.S. orchestras has increased fivefold. In one early instance when the screen was introduced at auditions for the orchestra at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, all four winning violinists were women. Up until then, that was about the number of women in the entire orchestra.
The moral: Sometimes a judgment made by an expert in the blink of an eye is correct—and sometimes it isn’t. The problem is to tell which is which.
And this starkly raises the question as to the place of what the art world calls connoisseuership in unmasking a forged ancient inscription.
Joseph Naveh, who at 77 is Israel’s leading paleographer, has said that an inscription sometimes arouses his “suspicion,” but if he can say no more than that he will not write about it; however, he will not use such an inscription is his research. Nevertheless, to label it a forgery, you must be able to explain why, he says. Sorbonne paleographer André Lemaire agrees. So does Johns Hopkins paleographer Kyle McCarter.
Pity the poor scholar with a suspicion. It is like being caught between a rock and a hard place—or, as they might put it, between Scylla and Charybdis. There is no doubt that there are very sophisticated forgers out there. Yet we cannot do without the items that come from the antiquities market. See Professor Frank Moore Cross’s compelling statement on this subject in this issue’s Update section.
As for those of us who do not have the expertise to make our own judgment, we must learn to live with uncertainty, especially when there are clashing scholarly views or judgments made on demonstrably shaky grounds.
Not long after writing these words, BAR managing editor Steven Feldman came across a supposedly ancient inscription that was described by an expert as having “orthographic [spelling] inconsistencies.” The script could be dated “almost 068anywhere in the seventh century [B.C.]” The writing was “unfortunately quite slovenly.” The content of the inscription appears to be a worker’s complaint that his coat has been confiscated unjustly and he is appealing to the governor for its return. It begins with what one scholar described as “the conventional formula”: “Let the lord the governor hear the word of his servant.” “This same turn of phrase” the scholar went on, “is found in the Old Testament, e.g., in David’s pleas to Saul in 1 Samuel 26:19: ‘Now, therefore, I pray thee, let my lord the king hear the words of his servant.’ … The general tenor of the (supposedly ancient) letter implies that the complainant was a man without any possessions, virtually one of the governor’s serfs. It seems likely that the debt in this case was simply his quota of work. The garment taken from him is aptly described in the words of Exodus 22:26 [see also Deuteronomy 24:10–13]: ‘That is his only covering; it is his raiment for his skin. Wherein shall he sleep?’ The Mosaic Law ordains that the distrained garment shall be returned by ‘[when] the sun goeth down.’… [In the letter can be heard] the cri de coeur of just such a helpless victim of oppression as the Law was intended to protect.”
The suspicious paleographic and orthographic aspects of the inscription would seem to be enough to condemn it as a forgery. When we add to this the obvious effort to illustrate a law mentioned in both Exodus and Deuteronomy (and this is not the only apparent Biblical allusion in the inscription), there can be little doubt that a not-so-clever forger is at work.
The paleographic and orthographic remarks quoted above are those of Professor William Foxwell Albright.1 On this basis alone one would expect the inscription to be declared the work of a modern forger. The interpretive comments quoted above are those of Professor Naveh, which would seem to lead just as clearly to the same obvious conclusion.2 But of course by now the reader will have guessed that that is not Professor’s Naveh’s conclusion at all. Indeed, he has no doubt, despite all of these highly suspicious circumstances, that the inscription is unquestionably authentic. The reason: Professor Naveh himself excavated it. It is the famous Mesad Hashavyahu inscription, well-known to all paleographers and Bible scholars.
Well-ensconced on the nonfiction best-seller list, Blink, by New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, recounts how experienced connoisseurs were able, in the blink of an eye, to evaluate the famous Getty kouros—and declare it a forgery! A kouros is a nude statue of a Greek youth standing with his arms at his side with one leg forward. One expert, when told the Getty museum was about to buy the kouros, replied, “I’m sorry to hear that.” Another expert, when he first saw it, felt cold. Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, said that the first […]
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