RE: MD Further comments to Matt

From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Tue Jan 18 2005 - 17:00:31 GMT

  • Next message: Ian Glendinning: "Re: MD The Long & Winding Road"

    Hi Matt,

    The following excerpt from the NYTimes book review of the book, "Blink"
    may help to answer some your skeptical "how" questions:

    "Gladwell opens ''Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking'' with the
    story of a kouros, an ancient Greek statue of a youth that came on the art
    market and was about to be purchased by the Getty Museum in California. It
    was a magnificently preserved work, close to seven feet tall, and the
    asking price was just under $10 million.

    "The Getty did all the normal background checks to establish the
    authenticity of the piece. A geologist determined that the marble came
    from the ancient Cape Vathy quarry on the island of Thasos. It was covered
    with a thin layer of calcite, a substance that accumulates on statues over
    hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. After 14 months of investigation,
    the Getty staff concluded the thing was genuine, and went ahead with the
    purchase.

    "But an art historian named Federico Zeri was taken to see the statue, and
    in an instant he decided it was fake. Another art historian took a glimpse
    and sensed that while it had the form of a proper classical statue, it
    somehow lacked the spirit. A third felt a wave of ''intuitive repulsion''
    when he first laid eyes on it.

    "Further investigations were made, and finally the whole scheme unraveled.
    It transpired that the statue had been sculptured by forgers in Rome in
    the early 1980's. The teams of analysts who did 14 months of research
    turned out to be wrong. The historians who relied on their initial hunches
    were right."

    The initial hunches by the three art historians illustrates their
    responses to Dynamic Quality, the front edge phase of experience. Both the
    prior and later investigations illustrate static Quality, i.e. the
    verification phase of experience.

    Best,
    Platt
      

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