Happy New Year everyone. To start off the new year, a couple of links you may have missed from Sunday's New York Times.
First, Simon Cole, author of Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification, had a very interesting piece on the use of fingerprint analysis in art authentication:
"[F]ingerprinting and art connoisseurship may not be all that different. There is no such thing as a 'perfect' fingerprint match. All fingerprint impressions, even those from the same finger, are at least slightly different. What there is, is a subjective judgment by a fingerprint examiner that two prints come from the same source finger. This of course sounds a lot like art authentication, which seeks to determine whether a disputed work derives from the same 'hand' as an undisputed one. Contrary to myth, fingerprint examiners do not base their attributions on scientific measurements. Rather they are subjective visual assessments of whether or not the features in the prints appear 'consistent.' Like art connoisseurs, fingerprint examiners’ basis for making these judgments is experience: a lot of time spent studying and looking at fingerprints. Most art connoisseurs, however, supplement their experience with extensive training in art history, whereas many fingerprint examiners lack formal training in science."
There was also this story, in the business section, on the importance of properly insuring one's art. It reports that "a typical policy may now provide 150 percent of the insured value, to provide an inflation guard" and the "typical rate for such insurance is about $1.20 per $1,000 in value." It adds that "insurance companies typically request appraisals every one to three years on pieces valued at more than $75,000, but some collectors get appraisals every six months because of the market’s volatility."
