Malcolm Gladwell Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Introduction. The Statue That Didnt Look Right
The Getty moved cautiously. It took the kouros on loan and began a thorough investigation. Was the statue consistent with other known kouroi? The answer appeared to be yes. The style of the sculpture seemed reminiscent of the Anavyssos kouros in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, meaning that it seemed to fit with a particular time and place. Where and when had the statue been found? No one knew precisely, but Becchina gave the Gettys legal department a sheaf of documents relating to its more recent history. The kouros, the records stated, had been in the private collection of a Swiss physician named Lauffenberger since the 1930s, and he in turn had acquired it from a well-known Greek art dealer named Roussos.
A geologist from the University of California named Stanley Margolis came to the museum and spent two days examining the surface of the statue with a high-resolution stereomicroscope. He then removed a core sample measuring one centimeter in diameter and two centimeters in length from just below the right knee and analyzed it using an electron microscope, electron microprobe, mass spectrometry, X-ray diffraction, and X-ray fluorescence. The statue was made of dolomite marble from the ancient Cape Vathy quarry on the island of Thasos, Margolis concluded, and the surface of the statue was covered in a thin layer of calcitewhich was significant, Margolis told the Getty, because dolomite can turn into calcite only over the course of hundreds, if not thousands, of years. In other words, the statue was old. It wasnt some contemporary fake.
The Getty was satisfied. Fourteen months after their investigation of the kouros began, they agreed to buy the statue. In the fall of 1986, it went on display for the first time. The New York Times marked the occasion with a front-page story. A few months later, the Gettys curator of antiquities, Marion True, wrote a long, glowing account of the museums acquisition for the art journal The Burlington Magazine. Now standing erect without external support, his closed hands fixed firmly to his thighs, the kouros expresses the confident vitality that is characteristic of the best of his brothers. True concluded triumphantly, God or man, he embodies all the radiant energy of the adolescence of western art.
The kouros, however, had a problem. It didnt look right. The first to point this out was an Italian art historian named Federico Zeri, who served on the Gettys board of trustees. When Zeri was taken down to the museums restoration studio to see the kouros in December of 1983, he found himself staring at the sculptures fingernails. In a way he couldnt immediately articulate, they seemed wrong to him. Evelyn Harrison was next. She was one of the worlds foremost experts on Greek sculpture, and she was in Los Angeles visiting the Getty just before the museum finalized the deal with Becchina. Arthur Houghton, who was then the curator, took us down to see it, Harrison remembers. He just swished a cloth off the top of it and said, Well, it isnt ours yet, but it will be in a couple of weeks. And I said, Im sorry to hear that. What did Harrison see? She didnt know. In that very first moment, when Houghton swished off the cloth, all Harrison had been a hunch, an instinctive sense that something was amiss. A few months later, Houghton took Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, down to the Gettys conservation studio to see the statue as well. Hoving always makes a note of the first word that goes through his head when he sees something new, and hell never forget what that word was when
he first saw the kouros. It was freshfresh, Hoving recalls. And fresh was not the right reaction to have to a two-thousand-year-old statue. Later, thinking back on that moment, Hoving realized why that thought had popped into his mind: I had dug in Sicily, where we found bits and pieces of these things. They just dont come out looking like that. The kouros looked like it had been dipped in the very best café latte from Starbucks.
Hoving turned to Houghton. Have you paid for this?
Houghton, Hoving remembers, looked stunned.
If you have, try to get your money back, Hoving said. If you havent, dont.
The Getty was getting worried, so they convened a special symposium on the kouros in Greece. They wrapped the statue up, shipped it to Athens, and invited the countrys most senior sculpture experts. This time the chorus of dismay was even louder.
Harrison, at one point, was standing next to a man named George Despinis, the head of the Acropolis Museum in Athens. He took one look at the kouros and blanched. Anyone who has ever seen a sculpture coming out of the ground, he said to her, could tell that that thing has never been in the ground. Georgios Dontas, head of the Archeological Society in Athens, saw the statue and immediately felt cold. When I saw the kouros for the first time, he said, I felt as though there was a glass between me and the work. Dontas was followed in the symposium by Angelos Delivorrias, director of the Benaki Museum in Athens. He spoke at length on the contradiction between the style of the sculpture and the fact that the marble from which it was carved came from Thasos. Then he got to the point. Why did he think it was a fake? Because when he first laid eyes on it, he said, he felt a wave of intuitive repulsion. By the time the symposium was over, the consensus among many of the attendees appeared to be that the kouros was not at all what it was supposed to be. The Getty, with its lawyers and scientists and months of painstaking investigation, had come to one conclusion, and some of the worlds foremost experts in Greek sculpturejust by looking at the statue and sensing their own intuitive repulsionhad come to another. Who was right?