FAKES AND FORGERIES
Jennifer Jenkins
The problem of whether a work of art is genuine or a forgery is multifold for the general public, the art historian and the philosopher alike. Some of these problems and their consequences will be external to the work of art itself. They may involve moral issues such as dishonesty and deception. Some problems are to do with financial value, some are legal and moral such as plagiarism. Other problems may include concern about the distortion of the outline of the history, the classification and ontology of art. However my main interest in this article will be something usually thought to be intrinsic to the work of art: the philosophical problem of aesthetic value. My main topic for discussion will be visual art as opposed to music or literature as I think here the problems are more compelling and also perhaps more complex.
First let us clarify and define what we mean when we talk of a genuine work of art as opposed to a forgery or a fake. The definition of a work of art, that is, the necessary and a sufficient condition for something to be called "art" is a hot-bed of debate. It may help to distinguish between different kinds of art.
When I speak of a genuine art work I mean in the case of visual art, paintings, sculpture, carvings or ceramics that have been been created by a single artist's own hand. Then again the status of a print or an etching will be different to an original water- colour painting. Again a reproduction, however perfect, will differ in status from this. The difference is important because the standards or criteria by which we may judge each to be a forgery will differ accordingly. The concept of a painting or sculpture is of a particular thing, even something unique, the aesthetic value of which cannot be gained without the object itself.
A forgery on the other hand implies something copied with intent to deceive but presented to the public as genuine. And, therefore, I would not want to say that it had originality in the sense of an artistic creation, though it may be a highly skilled piece of art work. This does not mean however that it will necessarily lack aesthetic value. The words fake and forgery rely heavily for their meaning on their antithesis, the " real or genuine thing". There are some obvious differences between a forgery and a genuine art work. These may be historical and geographical differences, chronological differences, their artists will have different life histories and life styles and, of course, one is a copy and one is an original creation. I will develop this claim later but briefly I will say that although an original painting and a forgery may represent the same scene or object, a forgery only represents whatever it is the original represents.
Some philosophers and writers on art have wanted to say that there is no real difference in aesthetic value between a forgery and a genuine work of art. But although a forgery has certain qualities that make it different from a genuine art work this does not necessarily entail that it contains more or less aesthetic value. Or that there is a distinction between an art work and a forgery that involves the notions of creativity and originality. I hope to show that these qualities are lacking in forgeries and to explore what difference this could possibly make to the aesthetic value of art works.
Alfred Lessing makes the claim that it is only the fact that the forgery lacks a certain kind of originality that makes any difference at all between a fake and a genuine work of art. Even then this will not necessarily be the case. Any distinction of aesthetic value between identical works is seen by him as snobbery. This kind of originality which is lacking in a forgery is against the "spirit of art" and is what makes a forgery lack integrity.
Arthur Koestler gives an example of a lady called Catherine who hangs a Picasso print on her staircase, but when she finds out it is a genuine Picasso line drawing and not a print she then hangs it in her drawing room. She is confused Koestler says, because although her definitions of what counts as aesthetically important are the usual qualities such as colour, form and line, the fact that she has displayed her picture where it can now be seen more easily indicates this is done from snobbery. But Catherine's defence of this is simply that now she knows it is a Picasso, she says she sees it differently, although the colour, line and form have not actually changed. Koestler cannot understand how this can be so. How can she see it differently when in fact it "looks" exactly the same?
According to Koestler, Catherine is confused because she mixes up what she thinks are aesthetically important characteristics, colour, shape and form, with the status and prestige of the artist. That is characteristics that are intrinsic to the work are confused with characteristics that come from outside the work. So Koestler thinks that when Catherine says she views it differently, because the things she counts as aesthetic questions, colour, form, line etc., have not changed it must be something else that has changed her mind: ie the external characteristics the status of the artist. I will try to show that although Catherine is confused, she is perfectly entitled to feel as she does without being labelled a snob.
The argument that there can be no real difference in aesthetic value between a forgery and an authentic work of art depends on a failure of these writers to make certain other distinctions and in their making strong distinctions that are unfounded, that are important to the notion of aesthetic value.
There is a distinction to be made between the art work and the artist that is often ignored in these discussions, (that Catherine perhaps failed to see) but there is also an important distinction between the art work and the aesthetic feeling it conveys in the viewer. The viewer's own private experiences and knowledge will be important when viewing the art-work and therefore will affect their appreciation, and hence their judgement about it.
This can be demonstrated by the example of an atheist viewing a Madonna and Child. They will not feel the same about the work as, for instance, a devout Catholic to whom the virgin birth is sacred and central to his or her beliefs about the world. While it is true that the fact that a work is not original in the sense that it does not involve creativity, it makes no difference perceptually if the two are identical in form. It will only make a difference to most people how they experience or view its aesthetic qualities when they understand its evolution and history. Lessing and Koestler reject this as snobbery.
Secondly there is a distinction to be made between an example of technique and a creation. For Lessing it is only the fact that a forgery is not an original and is "against the spirit of art" that makes any difference between the work of art and the forgery. It will make no difference to the aesthetic value. The qualities may appear identical and both forgery and the genuine work may be skillfully executed, but Lessing fails to see that this is merely technical skill and that may be copied again and again until it is perfected. There is no sense in which this could apply to a genuine work of art. That, I want to say is creative, and contains a unique set of properties.
Given an instance where a painting by a great artist has been copied, perhaps by a futuristic copying machine, and copied exactly, I grant that there will be no difference in the two paintings as far as most of the apparent internal properties are concerned. But one will still be an example of technique and the other a creation.
Although Lessing recognises that originality is important, that is, that the work is original to the particular artist at that place and time, he says that this will make an historical but not an aesthetic difference. So he is able to make the claim that uniqueness implying originality makes no difference because they are worth considering by reference only to the historical context which he says involves a non-aesthetic standard of judgement. But is it not true that sometimes what gives a work of art its historic or other non-aesthetic values are the aesthetic qualities that we admire in it so much in the first place?
In order to prove that certain qualities are not important to our aesthetic judgements about a forgery or a work of art, Lessing goes so far as to exclude certain categories of qualities that he otherwise might have allowed to be intrinsic and therefore aesthetic. He says that composition, colour, balance etc. can be specified in technical terms and so are not aesthetic qualities. This kind of technique, he says, can be had by anyone. This is precisely where I disagree. These qualities would I think be seen by most people as aesthetic qualities involved in an act of creation and not necessarily involved in a technique, though of course they may be.
The distinction that Lessing and other philosophers make, which is mistaken if not superfluous. It is between what are called apparent or internal properties of an art work and extrinsic properties. Apparent properties are the qualities that we can see in the work of art itself. If you like, they are the ones we can point to, listen to in a piece of music, or describe in a work of literature ie the colours in a painting, or the notes heard in a musical piece. They are actually in the text, or painting. External properties on the other hand are independant of the work itself. These might include the biographical history of the author or the conditions in which he executed his work. Writers such as Roland Barthes have disputed the fact that external properties are important at all. But most people when looking at Van Gogh's "Wheatfield with Crows" would recognize that his being close to suicide when he painted it is important to their understanding of the work of art itself.
Because Catherine's feelings change once she knows something which Koestler calls extrinsic to the art work itself, he thinks that this cannot and should not affect her sense of its aesthetic value. But why not? Well in a way he has a point. The apparent properties of a painting can on their own give aesthetic value, whereas the extrinsic properties no matter how many of them, cannot give aesthetic value by themselves. However, they can determine the way we perceive an art-work. It seems that the distinction between intrinsic and external properties as made by Lessing and Koestler is too clear cut, too distinct.
To avoid this difficulty I would like to add a third type of property, emergent properties. Between the more obviously internal formal properties (the colours and shapes) and the more obviously external properties (the development of the artist's work throughout his lifetime and his life history) lie the emergent properties, which follow from the internal physical and external properties and so-called extrinsic factors about a work of art. These are properties that cannot exist without the work itself, they are dependant on it. They are what we may find out about it through looking, but what may not be apparent to the eye or ear straight away. They may follow from either apparent or external properties. For instance the internal apparent properties of a picture such as red and green stripes might lead one to say that the picture has a garish quality (emergent). We can give examples of internal and emergent qualities only in particular cases. I can point to the bright red and green stripes in painting X and say they have a garish and vulgar quality and expect some agreement from my fellow critics. However, in painting Y red and green stripes may be thought of as exciting and vibrant. Again this might demand agreement from others.
It can be thought of as a two way relation between the internal and the external. Individual things that have aesthetic value contribute to the whole history of what counts as aesthetically valuable. This history itself will determine what we conceive of as aesthetically valuable in individual things. It is not that the relation between external and internal qualities affect our judgements but rather that our judgements affect our views of the relationship between the qualities. That is, it affects the way we see them. The meaning of the emergent qualities are embedded in the roles that they play, and the contexts of our everyday lives. Aesthetic value then seems to be theoretically separable from other qualities and feelings, but not practicably separable.
If aesthetic properties are always emergent then they cannot be said to be said to be either internal or external to the art work. It looks as though the distinction between internal and external properties as made by Koestler and Lessing for the purposes of this argument is an unnecessary one.
Let us summarize a little before going on. It is not the case then, as some writers, think that aesthetic qualities are only internal to the work of art and anything outside the work of art must be by definition non-aesthetic. Lessing and Koestler think that because there are no distinguishable visual properties in an exact copy and an original and aesthetic properties are internal visual propeties, then there will be no distinction in the aesthetic value of a copy and an original.
We do not see things in isolation from everything else. That is we do not passively receive information and then interpret what we see by assigning a meaning to it. When we see a tree in the distance through the window we do not think for a minute that it is only two inches high, though that is what we see. Our perception is governed by it's context.
When Manet and Cezanne produced their first works they were criticised for overthrowing all the hard won artistic values developed since the Renaissance. They were thought to be incompetent because their pictures did not live up to the standards of conventional pictorial representation. Because their critics were seeing their paintings in the light of traditional figure paintings, they were unable to see them in their contemporary setting. They failed to see what it was the artists were trying to say. This was an attempt to change people's views of traditional aesthetic values, that is, to do something different from David and Ingres. Thus the achievement of the artist in doing successfully what he set out to do when he creates is not incidental to our judgement of the aesthetic value of his work but a necessary constituent of it. We judge the work by the artist's own tenets of success or failure. This sense of achievement is necessarily missing in a forgery.
I would like to say some more about the sense of originality and uniqueness that I think is important to a distinction between a work of art and a forgery. This is the sense involved in a creation. Originality could mean something entirely new, never executed or thought of before, that is, something innovative or daring such as Andre's bricks in the Tate. But anything can be unique in this sense. There is another more cognitive meaning of originality involving creativity which involves an unique idea and the execution of that idea. This is a working out of a solution to a particular problem that belongs only to that person at that particular time in the sense that only they can do it, and is a creative act. This is what Lessing calls "imaginative spontaneity", seeming to think that this will give it less value or make its value external to the art work which for him would make it non-aesthetic. It is this sort of creative originality that I want to say is lacking in a forgery.
The forgery and an art work then will be indistinguishable from each other aesthetically if they are indistinguishable in only their intrinsic apparent properties for Lessing. Even if uniqueness and creativity are lacking in an art work, it may be as aesthetically pleasing as a forgery. This lack of originality though cannot be what distinguishes a forgery from a work of art. Happily so because many genuine works of art lack this quality and so are not original in the sense that they are typical of a certain genre. For instance many Renaissance Madonnas, were painted in the "style of" and not identical to another work. They have certain stylistic features unique to themselves as well as having imitative characteristics. The particular paintings are unique to that particular artist at that particular time but not original in the sense that they follow a certain style. These imitative features though properties of the copies or imitations are not original in the same sense that they are original properties of the genuine art works.
It may be fair to say that the view given above does not distinguish sufficiently between aesthetic difference and value. Uniqueness in the sense of simply being different from anything else is as I hope I have shown not enough to explain the distinction between art works and forgeries. Mark Sagof has offered a suggestion that will bring out this difference and show how it affects the respective value between forgeries and genuine art-works. He does this in a way that I think the most interesting so far.
Sagof's conclusion like mine is, that even if we cannot distinguish perceptually between two identical objects, there still might be a difference in their value because of other factors. His argument is very roughly this; that because we cannot use the same predicates of a forgery that we can of an art work then the two objects are too diverse to be comparable. He says we may as well ask "Is this painting as beautiful as Robert Redford", as "Is this painting as beautiful as a forgery"? When we talk about the two different objects we are using the word "beautiful" in two quite different "ways.
Sagof says predicates are ascribed to objects relative to reference classes or categories. When we say Robert Redford is a beautiful man we mean he is beautiful for a fifty odd year old white male, and we do not mean the same sort of thing as when we say " that is a beautiful flower". The adjective beautiful suggests a two way relationship between the individual or object and a class of individuals or objects. This implies that the object belongs (ie is a class member) to the class to which it is related. He says there is no categorical relationship between a forgery and an art work (except the uselessly large class that includes all paintings) that allows them to have the same predicates attributed to them.
This view asumes that we already know what the criteria for beauty are within certain categories. So in order to know just how and in what way Robert Redford is beautiful, I have to know which standards of beauty are applicable to a white male of fifty-something, and I have to know, that is I have to have the concept of, caucasian, man, age and beauty. But the point is that I do not look at Robert Redford and wonder which category he will fall under and then decide which criteria are applicable to that category, and then make my judgement whether he is beautiful or not. It is because I already know all these things prior to my judgement that I am able to make my judgement and say he is beautiful. In the same way we have to know what a forgery and a genuine work are with all that the terms imply, before we can really understand the aesthetic experience we are having. As Sagoff then goes on to say, the sortal concepts that establish art works are entrenched in us and therefore in what we say and think about an object. Is this though what actually determines that a quality belongs in the category of the aesthetic?
What happens when we do not know the category to which the object belongs. If I see what I take to be a beautiful shell on the beach and upon closer inspection it turns out to be a piece of broken glass does my attitude toward it then change? I suspect it does.
If there is no definite category to which aesthetic concepts necessarily apply then it seems that in agreement with Sagoff we can safely say that the same relational predicates will not apply to all of the different categories that we might say are applicable to aesthetic enquiry. Even when two paintings are identical in content and form they cannot both be said to be representations of the same thing. So for Sagoff,, the original and the forgery have the same status ie they belong to the same reference class in so far as they are representative of the same things, the relationship of the forgery to the original painting is one of similarity but the relationship between the original and what it is a representation of is one of denotation or representation. A forgery can only represent what the original represents. Though it might also represent the thing it depicts this is only contingent upon the artist's intention.
When an artist creates he has a problem to which he works out a solution that at least is his aim. The forgery, as Sagoff says, "lacks cognitive importance: it simply repeats a solution to a problem which has already been solved." By copying, an artist might learn the solution to a problem that has already been solved but will not necessarily learn how to recognize other problems or resolve them when they meet them. Sagoff claims that a forgery has the relation of similarity to the original which represents something but the original bears the relationship of denotation to what it represents. I can however appreciate a forgery for its purely intrinsic aesthetic qualities even though I know it to be a forgery.
Perhaps I just don't care that an art work is a forgery
or perhaps I do care but still find it pleasing or beautiful. But this
does not leave me, like Lessing, subordinating originality to aesthetic
value, where the quest for originality is but a means to an end. I can
accept and appreciate it for what it is: a forgery or a mimicry of a style
of an original which still allows its aesthetic qualities to have values
of their own..