DOESN'T THE MONETARY ASPECT CHEAPEN IT?

Mind Over Splatter (DON FOSTER, 2/19/06, NY Times)

If a previously authenticated Pollock painting was actually done by a disciple, or by Norman Rockwell, or by a monkey with a paintball gun, yet looks to be authentic Pollock, so what? The look-alike might be worth less at Sotheby's, but would it be worth less as art?

At stake in such attributional debates is a question of methodology: how can experts tell the difference between the real thing and an imitation? If the qualitative judgment of Pollock or Shakespeare scholars differs from quantitative analysis of a computer-assisted study, whose verdict will carry the day? That Richard Taylor's analysis can inform us of patterns generated by Pollock much of the time provides no guarantee that Pollock reproduced those patterns all of the time. But if the Pollock canon includes a forgery, it may be that Taylor's analysis provides a more objective mode of analysis than aesthetic appreciation.

I am well acquainted with the risks of over-reliance on quantitative techniques. In 1989 I published a book proposing that the 1612 poem "A Funeral Elegy," by "W. S.," might be Shakespeare's. Seven years later, the elegy made front-page news when computer-assisted analysis, along with the opinion of other Shakespeare scholars, tended to confirm that "W. S." was indeed Shakespeare. But in 2001, a French Shakespearean, Gilles Monsarrat, proposed that W. S. was in fact Shakespeare's junior colleague, John Ford. Computer-assisted analysis confirmed that this was probably right, and the title-page initials, wrong.

In the art world, the problem of attribution is complicated by market value. Nobody made more money by including "A Funeral Elegy" in editions of Shakespeare printed from 1997 to 2001. But if you have paid, say, a half-million for a Pollock painting and some physicist and his computer say that you were hoodwinked, the question of the work's value is not wholly aesthetic.

Whether it's good art certainly remains purely aesthetic.

Meanwhile, no one has challenged Mr. Foster's analysis of the Talking Points memo, which he demnstrated could not be the work of Monica Lewinsky and/or Linda Tripp and traced to the White House.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 19, 2006 10:01 AM