If you're wondering where John Stewart is coming from in this bit, a number of paintings surfaced last year that might or might not be previously unknown works by Jackson Pollock.

The question of whether they are authentic and just how to determine their authenticity has been a hot topic in the art world, inspiring among other things a documentary called, Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock? which is getting coverage in the latest issue of the New Yorker.  Here's an excerpt:

The art world, we keep hearing, is in a fine mess, awash in money and bereft of direction, and a recent documentary, “Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?,” seems to prove the point. In it, a retired truck driver in California named Teri Horton buys what she considers to be an ugly painting as a gag gift for five dollars at a thrift store, is later told that it looks like a Jackson Pollock (the title refers to her initial reaction), and then struggles to convince anyone who matters that it could be the real thing. The film pits old-fashioned art authenticators (Thomas Hoving, the former Met director, runs his fingers over the painting before declaring, “It’s dead on arrival”) against a forensic scientist in Montreal, Peter Paul Biro, who finds what he believes to be Pollock’s paint-stained fingerprints on the back of the canvas.

The controversy has also been covered in The New York Times

Mind Over Splatter
... Richard Taylor, a physics professor retained by the Krasner Foundation to subject six of the paintings to computer-assisted analysis, discovered that the paintings may well be fakes — at least, the drips lack Pollock's characteristic geometric pattern. The collection's owner disputes that this finding is conclusive.

At the heart of the controversy lie critical questions about artistic meaning and value that have vexed literary scholars no less than art historians...

"What matter who's speaking?" asked Michel Foucault, quoting Samuel Beckett.

What matter whose painting? The implied answer — no matter at all — takes for granted that cultural artifacts are symptomatic of the society that produced them.

The critic's job, then, is to assess the product on its own merits, quite apart from the artist's name or reputation. If "Hamlet" had been written by Christopher Marlowe or Edward de Vere, not by William Shakespeare, would the text therefore be less great? Perhaps not, but we would think of it in a different way...

At stake in such attributional debates is a question of methodology: how can experts tell the difference between the real thing and an imitation? If the qualitative judgment of Pollock or Shakespeare scholars differs from quantitative analysis of a computer-assisted study, whose verdict will carry the day? That Richard Taylor's analysis can inform us of patterns generated by Pollock much of the time provides no guarantee that Pollock reproduced those patterns all of the time.

And here's an excerpt from a recently posted article on the Blog, Raise the Hammer that seems to adds to the question of whether a computer is better than a human at analyzing artistic ownership. (The whole post is worth a read.) This bit comes close to the end:

Stan Brakhage, the experimental filmmaker, tells a story of being in Pollock's studio in the late 40s with a bunch of composers who were discussing the use of "chance elements" in their music and how Pollock was doing something similar in painting.

Pollock, not the most articulate man, was getting visibly angry at this talk and finally said: "Do you see that doorknob?"

According to Brakhage the door was between 20 and 30 feet away. He dipped his stick in an open pot of paint, hurled it across the room and it hit smack in the middle of the doorknob and then he said: "That's what I think of chance. Now use it!"

Whether you like the paintings or not, Pollock knew where the paint was going and what it would look like when it got there.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about seeing Ed Harris play Jackson Pollock in the film Pollock, which Harris spent close to ten years researching. He not only studied Pollock, he learned to paint, and ultimately directed the film. Harris created a striking portrait of a man whose ghost is most likely enjoying all the hubbub over whether it's a "real" Jackson Pollock. Again from the NY Times:

Meanwhile, Jackson Pollock may be chuckling in his grave: if the object of Abstract Expressionist work is to embody the rebellious, the anarchic, the highly idiosyncratic — if we embrace Pollock's work for its anti-figurative aesthetic — may faux-Pollock not be quintessential Pollock? May not a Pollock forgery that passes for authentic be the best Pollock of all?