Week 12: Defending a verdict

The last lecture: what the final project asks for, and why a defended verdict still matters after week 11.

24 May 2027

Week 11 argued that “authentic” is a working distinction, not a fact waiting to be dug up. That is a reason to hold a verdict carefully, not a reason to stop giving one: a museum still has to decide what a wall label says, a collector still has to decide what to pay, and a scholar still has to decide what claim to put their name behind in print. The whole semester has been building the evidence a verdict like that should rest on; this lecture is about the last piece, which is presentation — saying plainly what you believe, how confident you are, and exactly what would change your mind.

The final project asks you to do that once, in full, on a painting you choose from the semester’s shortlist or bring from your own reading, and then defend it live against questions from the room. The defense is not a formality tacked onto the writing: it’s where an argument that only looked solid on paper usually gets found out, which is the same thing a colophon or a seal is for.

Outline#

• what the final project’s dossier-plus-defense format is actually testing
• how to state a verdict with calibrated confidence, and name what would overturn it
• the semester’s toolkit, reviewed once as a checklist rather than twelve separate weeks
• how the defenses run, and what happens after they do