I packed a lot of ‘hard’ science into this morning (genomics in Africa, the neuroscience of memory and imagination – see Mitch’s post below – and detecting/preventing nuclear trafficking), so this afternoon I opted for a session entitled Art and Connoisseurship: New Scientific Techniques conserve Art and Architecture. The ‘new’ bit was somewhat misleading, as the techniques and case studies themselves have had quite a bit of publicity already – including work assessing the authenticity of some purported Jackson Pollock paintings (featured in Nature) and a study analysing the maths behind tessellated islamic tiles (Science paper here). But the content made a nice contrast to the rest of the day.

The most interesting message of the session for me was that despite all the rigorous science behind authenticating paintings and discovering more about how they were made, none of the gathered evidence can be used when cases of supposed forgery and the like get to court. These techniques, which include 3D scanning, carbon dating and infrared spectroscopy, are by no means preliminary or untested – but the uniqueness of many of the paintings means that “there hasn’t been the replication needed” for them to be used in court, says art lawyer Jessica Darraby, who moderated the discussion. I asked Narayan Khandekar of Harvard University Art Museums about this. He has worked on authenticating several possible Pollocks, and given the value of these paintings, one might think his testimony valuable – but he has never been asked to give evidence of their genuineness, or otherwise. What is more, he spoke of a tendency for the art world to believe what they want to believe, and often ignore the science.

It was Alex Matter, a filmmaker who inherited several artworks from his parents (who were friends of the artist), who enlisted Khandekar to analyse several of his paintings and see if they were the genuine article. Khandekar had to give disappointing news. The team looked at three paintings, and in each they found pigments that had not been created by chemical companies until the 1970s, two decades after Pollock’s death.

An even fishier story underlay one of them. The first painting the team received had been badly damaged, with deep indentations and lots of paint missing, and partially restored. The cause? The story the owner told was that he’d left the painting in his flat for a few days, where it were brutally attacked by…his cat.

I packed a lot of ‘hard’ science into this morning (genomics in Africa, the neuroscience of memory and imagination – see Mitch’s post below – and detecting/preventing nuclear trafficking), so this afternoon I opted for a session entitled Art and Connoisseurship: New Scientific Techniques conserve Art and Architecture. The ‘new’ bit was somewhat misleading, as the techniques and case studies themselves have had quite a bit of publicity already – including work assessing the authenticity of some purported Jackson Pollock paintings (featured in Nature) and a study analysing the maths behind tessellated islamic tiles (Science paper here). But the content made a nice contrast to the rest of the day.

The most interesting message of the session for me was that despite all the rigorous science behind authenticating paintings and discovering more about how they were made, none of the gathered evidence can be used when cases of supposed forgery and the like get to court. These techniques, which include 3D scanning, carbon dating and infrared spectroscopy, are by no means preliminary or untested – but the uniqueness of many of the paintings means that “there hasn’t been the replication needed” for them to be used in court, says art lawyer Jessica Darraby, who moderated the discussion. I asked Narayan Khandekar of Harvard University Art Museums about this. He has worked on authenticating several possible Pollocks, and given the value of these paintings, one might think his testimony valuable – but he has never been asked to give evidence of their genuineness, or otherwise. What is more, he spoke of a tendency for the art world to believe what they want to believe, and often ignore the science.

It was Alex Matter, a filmmaker who inherited several artworks from his parents (who were friends of the artist), who enlisted Khandekar to analyse several of his paintings and see if they were the genuine article. Khandekar had to give disappointing news. The team looked at three paintings, and in each they found pigments that had not been created by chemical companies until the 1970s, two decades after Pollock’s death.

An even fishier story underlay one of them. The first painting the team received had been badly damaged, with deep indentations and lots of paint missing, and partially restored. The cause? The story the owner told was that he’d left the painting in his flat for a few days, where it were brutally attacked by…his cat.