In the third instal­ment of the Bam­boo­zling Our­selves series (a look at the mas­ter Ver­meer forger, Han van Meegeren), Errol Mor­ris inter­views the author of The Forger’s Spell, Edward Dol­nick, and the two dis­cuss the appli­ca­tion of the uncanny val­ley in the forgery of art.

I par­tic­u­larly like Dolnick’s thoughts on the hin­drance of exper­tise (final para­graph of this excerpt).

You would think a close copy would be the goal of a forger, but it might not be a smart way to go. If you were a bril­liant tech­ni­cian it might be an accept­able strat­egy, but my forger, Van Meegeren, is not as good as that. […] He’s going to get in trou­ble, because that’s ask­ing for a side-by-side com­par­i­son, and he’s not good enough to get away with that. […]

So how is he going to paint a pic­ture that doesn’t look like a Ver­meer, but that peo­ple are going to say, “Oh! It’s a Ver­meer?” How’s he going to pull it off? It’s a tough chal­lenge. Now here’s the point of The Uncanny Val­ley: as your imi­ta­tion gets closer and closer to the real thing, peo­ple think, “Good, good, good!” — but then when it’s very close, when it’s within 1 per­cent or some­thing, instead of focus­ing on the 99 per­cent that is done well, they focus on the 1 per­cent that you’re miss­ing, and you’re in trou­ble. Big trouble. […]

Van Meegeren is trapped in the val­ley. If he tries for the close copy, an almost exact copy, he’s going to fall short. He’s going to look silly. So what he does instead is rely on the blanks in Vermeer’s career, because hardly any­thing is known about him. […] He’ll take advan­tage of those blanks by invent­ing a whole new era in Vermeer’s career. No one knows what he was up to all this time. He’ll throw in some Ver­meer touches, includ­ing a sig­na­ture, so that peo­ple who look at it will be led to think, “Yes, this is a Vermeer.” […]

It wasn’t going to be about how “you can’t tell the dif­fer­ence,” because you could. It would be, “How could peo­ple look at these things which are man­i­festly so dif­fer­ent and not see what’s going on?” It became a story about how experts can get it wrong, and in fact, how expert knowl­edge, instead of help­ing, can be a hin­drance. On the sur­face it seemed to be a story about art and his­tory, but really, it’s a story about psychology.