His final conclusion is terrible and spoils an otherwise excellent article. Unless he has really strong evidence of it, the specialists are very unlikely to be "trolling" the public. They are scientists and conservators doing their best, working away in museum backrooms.

"trolling" in this instance seems to be a nicer way of saying "misleading to create attention". It's hard to deny that "look at how garish these beautiful statures originally looked" created a lot more attention than a theoretical "Roman statues looked pretty nice, but with paint"

It's an unsubstantiated theory, but the author does go out of their way to say that this might not even be objectionable, if it happened at all

Yes, it’s speculating when it would have been better to do some journalism and ask some experts what they were doing.

Even worse so: Why does he not simply ask these people? What is it with this trend of sneering at expert decisions without even doing the bare minimum of engaging with them?

  > They are scientists and conservators doing their best

Even if tastes have indeed changed, something that matches our current taste will reproduce the impact of the statues better than a scientifically meticulous and factually accurate depiction that misses the emotional truth.

It could be survival bias trolling: those who accidentally troll get attention, not understanding that they are trolling.

> They are scientists and conservators doing their best, working away in museum backrooms.

Yesterday’s kids are today’s scientists. You what the most popular archeological student prank is? - It’s for a team to bury a modern piece of pottery in another team’s site. So I am not at all surprised if they wanted to play a few practical jokes on the public’s ignorance.

Trolling here means that they followed the tradition of restoring the items - use just the materials they found on the statues. Well the materials found were the base layers - so that’s what you restore. You don’t go adding shading or fades or iridescent paint because it looks cute. They create art that looks like an 8 year old painted it, then laugh at the public “ooh-ing and ah-ing” over the “beautiful” restorations.

You didn't see all of the thinkpieces from leftwing academics (inlcuding Mark Zuckerberg's sister) making the link between white marble and "white supremacy," and emphasizing polychromy as a means of de-whitening the represented figures? It never quite made sense to me, as even with coloration, the figures still appeared European, though the academics seemed to think the (unsurprising) uncommonness of blonde hair and blue eyes in the recreations was a "win."

Meh. Maybe. Or maybe "click bait" is a better guess than "trolling". Or even maybe he's right, despite writing something "terrible."

1. The professional qualifications of the people doing the actual work should be taken seriously. But the professionals have no control over the people who dictated how the work should be done, or the people who thought out the marketing. I hope this point is clear to engineers.

2. Even if the "trolling" sentiment is both incorrect and "terrible" ... ok. Noted. That doesn't destroy the value of the whole article.

Screed:

Many of us have reached the point where we throw away the baby if we find the slightest imperfection in the bath water. This now includes medicine, values, science, and (at least in the US) our freedom and our functioning society.

We need to grow up. Another example that many modern folks cannot handle is errors in the scientific literature. The scientific literature is incredibly valuable, despite also containing a lot of errors. That's life. Reading the literature is like fixing a car or playing an instrument. It works fine if you know how to use it. We need to grow up and deal.

Have you encountered modern art?

Are our betters malicious or simply morons. A question as old as time.

The statues were obviously carved by expert artists but these "specialists" would have us believe they were subsequently painted by half-assed amateurs. It fails the sniff test so badly, that trolling is a reasonable conclusion. You don't put that much effort into making something only then let some unskilled intern ruin it by covering up all your work with a flat coat of primer and leave it at that.