that.” But at that moment of first doubt, they were a long way
from being able to enumerate precisely why they felt the way
they did. Hoving has talked to many art experts whom he calls
fakebusters, and they all describe the act of getting at the truth
of a work of art as an extraordinarily imprecise process. Hoving
says they feel “a kind of mental rush, a flurry of visual facts
flooding their minds when looking at a work of art. One
fakebuster described the experience as if his eyes and senses
were a flock of hummingbirds popping in and out of dozens of
way stations. Within minutes, sometimes seconds, this
fakebuster registered hosts of things that seemed to call out to
him, ‘Watch out!’ ”
Here is Hoving on the art historian Bernard Berenson. “[He]
sometimes distressed his colleagues with his inability to
articulate how he could see so clearly the tiny defects and
inconsistencies in a particular work that branded it either an
unintelligent reworking or a fake. In one court case, in fact,
Berenson was able to say only that his stomach felt wrong. He
had a curious ringing in his ears. He was struck by a momentary
depression. Or he felt woozy and off balance. Hardly scientific
descriptions of how he knew he was in the presence of
something cooked up or faked. But that’s as far as he was able