Michael Kimmelman has a great essay in the NYT about the current show at the National Gallery in London called “Close Examinations: Fakes, Mistakes, and Discoveries” about art sleuthing and the science of finding out whether a work is genuine or not. At first glance, he says, the exhibit almost seems too academic, but look closer and you’ll see:

It’s one of those gems, which, amid the hard science, stumbles onto squishier truths about what we are really looking for when we look at art. Out to instruct us in the chemistry of painting, it ends up suggesting how elusive art remains despite all the gadgets that we devise to master it.

Along the way it riffs on the mistaken-identity theme: a picture given in good faith by the City of Nuremberg to Charles I in 1636 as a work by Dürer that’s proved to be a copy; a copy of a Veronese that, after grime is removed, emerges as the genuine article. And there are forgeries, art’s whodunits, pandering to our basest instinct for knocking experts off pedestals. People love fakes because fakes play into the populist suspicion that much art is really just a scam, a suspicion encouraged by the fancy names wrongly attached to and insane prices often paid for the stuff.

Read it all the way to the end. Great essay.