The Drip Wars

From the NY Times:

THE disciplines of art history and connoisseurship tend to conjure up images of hushed galleries, towering library stacks and an almost priestly corps of experts equipped not only with the knowledge of centuries but also with “the eye,” a sixth sense of whether a canvas is a Rembrandt or just an attractive also-ran.
But increasingly, other things might be included in this tableau — electron microscopes, infrared spectroscopes, radiocarbon dating, X-ray fluorescence technology first developed for the Mars Pathfinder and teams of white-coated people with mechanical engineering or physics doctorates poring over artwork.

More on science's increasing role in art and the latest information on the debate as to whether or not that Matter painting is, in fact, a Pollock.