

A Rare Look into the Imprecise World of Art Identification - pepys
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/arts/design/with-misattributed-masterpiece-a-rare-look-into-the-imprecise-world-of-art-identification.html

======
WalterBright
Isn't it a bit sad that art is judged 1000:1 based on who painted it rather
than its artistic merit?

~~~
benten10
Imagine you are an editor, and get two proofs (500 pages each) of an unproven
hypothesis. One is written by someone who's on top of the field, published 200
papers, and all his papers are cited hundreds of times. Another from an
undergrad from a dinkytown's DinkyU. You have limited time. Who would you
rather check?

And that's for a purely objective field, where you can logic your way through
a proof. With art, you don't even know if the proofs are right or wrong. Given
two papers with very similar content, and one genius in the field and one
unknown, and very little means to tell which one is strictly 'objectively'
better, how would you judge them?

