Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

by Malcolm Gladwell

When Harrison and Hoving and the Greek experts first confronted the kouros, they experienced waves of repulsion and words popping into their heads, and Harrison blurted out, “I’m sorry to hear 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!’”