Well Tom, i'm with you you on Warhol, i think he was a fake and a user who had a few good concepts that he execured ad nauseum. So they can let the rocks fly at both of us.
But i also think Clapton's greatness is a bit exaggerated too. Good Rock/Blues guitarist with very little originality. No humility there, just being the honest journeyman that he is.
Of Warhol, i have yet to encounter fans of his work referring to him as a "master". It is also well known that much of his work was actually executed by apprentices in his infamous "Factory", with his oversight of course. Now Picasso might be a better comparison because i HAVE heard him referred to as a "master". Much of his best known work is in cubist form, an abstraction of reality just as this particular hilt is. It sometimes looks childish and even simple, but i wouldn't assume i could do it with the same power and meaning. Being a master isn't always in the details. This hilt is meant to look this way and wasn't necessarily carved as an abstraction because the artist was incapable of depicting a realistic figure. This was the artist's intent. Now i certainly wouldn't say he is a "master" based on this one piece of work. But likewise i couldn't say he is not.
Personally i find this type of abstraction to be far ahead of it's time and we know that the cubists amongst other "modern" artists were all looking at so-called "primative" art when they were developing their ideas.
Tom, this is not a challenge, but since you have stated more than once that you could carve this as well, i for one would love to see it. You might actually get some business out of it.
Wolviex, dating of keris is almost ALWAYS problematic
especially when trying to do it just from photographs. A big part of the problem is that some of these keris forms can linger for centuries with very little change in appearance. Still, i thing that BluErf has perhaps applied a bit too much age to this piece and i personally would feel more comfortable with late 18th - early 19thC as Boedhi Adhitya suggests. Without any real provenence it is hard to say for sure. I am surprised that the museum has none at all. I would expect that at least getting info like where and when a piece was collected would be standard for any museum.
Of course, whether this keris is 17thC or 18thC matters little in the end, especially since we will probably never know for sure. What matters is that this is a fine example of an "older" (pre-late19th or 20thC) form with a fairly rare hilt form and that it should be prized by you and your museum.