Moving towards a bright oil canvas encased in a gold gilded, rectangular frame, you marvel at the texture made from antiquated brush strokes and the elaborate gradient of colors. Finding another piece, you repeat the process. Slowly, but surely, you make your way through the pictorialized labyrinth of art. There’s no suspicion, at all, concerning the authenticity of the artworks you appreciated. Yet, there are times when you ponder over the chances that an art piece hanging in a museum is a fraud.
Naturally, society does not look upon such duplicity favorably. However, as Blake Gopnik, an art critic and writer for the New York Times, states, “Forgery is very clearly an economic crime, [but] it may not always be an artistic or aesthetic one.” Our repulsion with forgery stems from (1) the belief that great art is not imitable, and (2) the fury and embarrassment felt by those publicly revealed to be fools of a forger’s duplicity. We have no problem appreciating well-crafted forgeries so long as we are unaware of the artwork being one.
The art market justifies its high prices by keeping up the pretense that all art is inimitable. Art is known, in economics today, as “positional goods.” Society deems artworks valuable and expensive solely because others can’t posses one that has already been seized.
This idea that art is inimitable was not, however, always believed in. According to Alexander Nagel, a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York specializing in Renaissance art, forgery was a concept invented when people such as dealers, collectors, and connoisseurs came about. Before that, Mr. Nagel points out that patrons did not view art “as singularities, as unrepeatable performances by an author.” Rather, a duplicate was appreciated as if it were the authentic piece so long as the larger aesthetic ideas and the ideals of the artists were conveyed. Additionally, Mr. Gopnik logically argues that forged paintings “almost perfectly capture [an artist’s] unique contribution to art. If they didn’t, no one would imagine [that the artist] made them.” Thus, if a duplicate is good enough to bamboozle experts, it should be good enough to give us, the novice audience, the same pleasure and insight as the original artwork would.
What would it mean, then, to commit forgery in a time when originals and duplicates are interchangeable?
Unfortunately, dealers, collectors, and connoisseurs have helped make such practices illegal. Many compare art forgery to plagiarism (except for the simple fact that plagiarists steal other peoples’ works while forgers pass off their work as someone else’s). Being incapable of differentiating the forgery from the real artwork, many connoisseurs have faced embarrassment at being ridiculed for their lack of skill. They have been angered, their pride smarting at being played a fool by a forger’s duplicity. Ultimately, connoisseurs have passed the embarrassment and anger to the public, convincing us that forgers are ridiculing not only art experts but anyone who looks and appreciates “genuine” art.
However, when encountered with a forgery, our first instinct is to marvel at the ingenuity of it. We are awed by the skills of the forger – to create and convince the mass public of the authenticity of an artwork that should have been, if real, centuries old is no easy task. As technology advances, such deceitfulness becomes more difficult to maintain. These days, art patrons can test the validity of an art piece through techniques such as dendrochronology, stable isotope analysis, thermoluminescence, atomic absorption, and so much more. For a forgery to pass all these examinations, the forger must either be extremely skilled or just exceptionally lucky.
On second thought, it’s a combination of luck, skill, and the faulty pride of connoisseurs.
Technological tests for authenticity are not easy. The simplest of exams take at least two months to produce adequate, though definitely not thorough, results. Comprehensive results originate from multiple tests and long periods of verification. Ultimately, many patrons rely on the concept of connoisseurship as a faster form of authentication.
An art connoisseur who is deemed knowledgeable concerning the details, techniques, and/or principles of an art will study a piece of artwork and judge for authenticity. However, as Mr. Gopnik details, “the connoisseur’s eye works brilliantly in that vast majority of attributions where an artwork comes without a name attached but clearly has a single maker’s signature look. And then that eye fails utterly in those remaining, more iffy cases where a piece looks quite like some artist’s work, but may almost as easily be by someone else.” Needless to say, connoisseurship cannot be trusted, as it does not work. John Myatt, named 20th century’s biggest fraud, painted and sold more than 200 forgeries for nearly a decade before convicted. Christie’s and Sotheby’s, two of the world’s largest brokers of fine and decorative art, valued his works for 25,000 British pounds rather than the 250 pounds Mr. Myatt was selling for.
As anticipated, such fraud would create economic dilemmas as patrons and collectors are cheated in their investments. Additionally, the prides of connoisseurs who gave these forgeries the green light to be auctioned would be smarting. However, such scandals have revealed just how deluded we are by the connoisseur’s eye. We have advanced technology to detect frauds. Yet, we believe that “experts” well trained in detecting authenticity suffice and are on par with our technology. That is not the case.
Forgers have taught society to doubt connoisseurship. Simultaneously, they remind us that the understanding of art should not be restricted by the obsession with “authenticity” and “unique artistic touch.”
Ethically, we should be wary of forgers. However, looking at forgery from the aesthetic and artistic perspective, we should appreciate its achievements. The overall art market should aim to make art more accessible to a wider audience. Unfortunately, our art market is geared towards the rich, using the pretense of inimitability to price high. Many emerging artists and collectors are unable to participate in the big-money game. Museums that wish to expose the public to different art forms are incapable of competing with barons, the majority who collect art solely for the sake of status rather than appreciation. Many museums run on donations and have limited funding; barons can always pay more.
Forgers, in a way, evens the gap between the wealthy and the middle-class by making the access to aesthetic ideas and artistic ideals, the definition of art before the advent of “forgery,” more accessible.
