First Person: Snap Judgments

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 […]