Excerpted from “Artistic Crimes” by Denis Dutton in The Forger’s Art, ed. Denis Dutton, University of California Press (1983). Reprinted by permission of the author.
The concept of forgery is a touchstone of criticism. If the existence of forgeries—and their occasional acceptance as authentic works of art—has been too often dismissed or ignored in the theory of criticism, it may be because of the forger’s special power to make the critic look ridiculous. Awkward as it is, critics have heaped the most lavish praise on art objects that have turned out to be forged. The suspicion this arouses is, of course, that the critics were led to praise the forgery for the wrong reasons in the first place. Since the aesthetic object as perceived is no different after the revelation that it is forged, the implication to be drawn is that it had previously been critically valued not for its intrinsic aesthetic properties, but because it was believed to be the work of an esteemed artist.
As natural as this suspicion is, it represents a point of view I shall seek to discredit in the following discussion. Everyone recognizes that the proper identification of an art object as genuine or forged is crucial as regards monetary value, that forgery has moral implications, that there are important historical reasons for wanting to distinguish the genuine from the faked art object. …
Consider for a moment Smith and Jones, who have just finished listening to a new recording of Liszt’s Transcendental Études. Smith is transfixed. He says, “What beautiful artistry! The pianist’s tone is superb, his control absolute, his speed and accuracy dazzling. Truly an electric performance!” Jones responds with a sigh. “Yeah, it was electric all right. Or to be more precise, it was electronic. He recorded the music at practice tempo and the engineers speeded it up on a rotating head recorder.” Poor Smith—his enthusiasm evaporates. …
The distinction between so-called creative and performing arts has certain obvious uses: We would not wish to confuse the actor and the playwright, the conductor and the composer, the dancer and the choreographer. And yet this distinction (often employed invidiously against the performer) can cause us to lose sight of the fact that in certain respects all arts are creative, and correlatively, all arts are performing. It is this latter fact which is of particular relevance to understanding what is wrong with forgeries. For it can be argued that every work of art—every painting, statue, novel, symphony, ballet, as well as every interpretation or rendition of a piece of music, every reading of a poem or production of a play—involves the element of performance.
When we speak of a performance we usually have in mind a human activity which stands in some sense complete in itself: We talk of the President’s performance at a press conference, or a student’s performance on an examination, with the intention of marking off these particular activities from the whole of a presidential administration or the quality of the student’s work done throughout a course. Moreover, as these examples also indicate, performances are said to involve some sense of accomplishment, of achievement. As objects of contemplation, artworks stand in differing relations to the performances of artists, depending on the art form in question. On the one hand, we have such arts as the dance, where the human activity involved in creating the object of contemplation and the object itself are one and the same thing. In such a case it would be odd to say that the object somehow represents the performance of the artist, because to perceive the object is to perceive the performance. On the other hand, we have painting, where we normally perceive the work of art without perceiving those actions which have brought it into being. Nevertheless, in cases such as the latter what we see is the end-product of human activity; the object of our perception can be understood as representative of a human performance. That arts differ with respect to how or whether we actually perceive at the moment of creation the artist’s performance makes no difference to the relevance of the concept to understanding all of the arts. In fact, the concept of performance is internal to our whole notion of art. …
In the most obvious sense, a forgery is an artifact of one person which is intentionally attributed to another, usually with the purpose of turning a profit. But what is wrong with forgeries—and forgeries of painting would stand merely as the most famous examples—is that they not only misattribute origin: Because they misattribute origin, they misrepresent achievement. It is essential that forgeries be understood as a subset of a wider class of misrepresented artistic performances. Since all art can be seen under the aspect of performance, whether or not the art in question is conventionally called “performing,” there exists always the possibility that the nature of the achievement involved in the performance may be misrepresented or misunderstood. In my example of the piano recording, Smith brings to his experience certain expectations regarding what is to count as achievement in the art in question, and these expectations are not met. The point is that Smith’s experience cannot be understood as an experience of sound, such that the faster and more brilliant the sounds the better; Smith’s experience of sound implies the experience of a performance, of something done in a certain way by a human being.
The fundamental question, then, is: What has the artist done, what has he achieved? The question is fundamental, moreover, not because of any contingent facts about the psychology of aesthetic perception, but because of the nature of the concept of art itself. As I have noted, Smith’s initial disappointment in the piano recording may later be replaced by admiration for the skill and sensitivity with which the engineer has varied the tempi of the recording. This does not indicate that Smith’s response can be understood as merely conditioned by his beliefs about what he perceives. To the contrary, Smith’s beliefs are about what he takes to be a work of art, and hence are centered on what he understands to be the achievement implicit in what he perceives. Technological advances in the arts in general, the inventions of airbrushes, electric stage lighting, sound synthesizers, and so forth, have tended progressively to alter what counts as achievement in the arts; these advances have in no way altered the relevance of the concept of achievement in art or criticism and hence have not changed to that extent the concept of art ¨berhaupt. Smith’s mistake about the nature of the achievement before him, or the experts’ mistakes about the van Meegeren1 Vermeers, simply requires that the question of what the achievement is be recast: Indeed, the achievement of the engineer may be worthy of admiration, just as the achievement of van Meegeren was considerable. Still, the achievement of an engineer is not the achievement of a pianist, and the achievement of van Meegeren, however notable it may be, cannot be identical with that of Vermeer. …
Thus the concept of art is constituted a priori of certain essential properties. I do not propose to enumerate those features (the question of the contents of any such list lies at the heart of the philosophy of art); but I do insist that reference to origins and achievement must be included among these properties. This whole issue is what gives the problem of forgery such central philosophical importance: Theorists who claim that it ought to make no difference to appreciation whether a work is forged or not do not merely challenge a few dearly held cultural beliefs about what is important in art. To the contrary, they attack the very idea of art itself.
Let us take stock of what I have so far argued. I have claimed that in certain respects, differing according to the type of art in question, the concept of performance is intrinsic to our understanding of art; that works of art of whatever sort can be seen under the aspect of performance. In emphasizing the importance of the notion of performance in understanding art, I have centered attention on the extent to which works of art are the end products of human activities, on the degree to which they represent things done by human agents. In this way, part of what constitutes our understanding of works of art involves grasping what sort of achievement the work itself represents. This takes us, then, to the question of the origins of the work: We cannot understand the work of art without some notion of its origins, who created it, the context in which the creator worked, and so forth. But now it must be stressed that our interest in origins, in the possibility or actuality of human achievement, always goes hand-in-hand with our interest in the work of art as visual, verbal, or aural surface. In its extreme forms, contextualism in critical theory has tended to emphasize the origins of the work, its status as human achievement, at the expense of attention to the purely formal properties; in its exclusive concentration on formal properties, isolationism, or formalism, has (by definition) tended to slight the importance of the human context, the human origins, of art. Both of these positions in their more extreme and dogmatic forms constitute a kind of philistinism. The more familiar sort of philistinism has it that if a work of art is a forgery, then it must somehow be without value: Once we are told that these are van Meegerens before us, and not Vermeers, we reject them, though their formal properties remain unchanged. The opposed sort of philistinism, which could well be called aestheticist philistinism, claims that formal properties are the only significant properties of works of art; that since questions of origins are not important, it ought to make no difference to us at all whether we are confronted with Vermeers or van Meegerens. Both positions are properly called philistine because both fail to acknowledge a fundamental element of artistic value. …
The significant opposition I find then is not between “forged” and “original,” but between correctly represented artistic performance and misrepresented artistic performance. Originality remains a highly relevant concept here, however, insofar as it shows us that some notion of the origins of a work is always germane to appreciation. Without such concern, we cannot understand the full nature of the achievement a work represents, and such understanding is intrinsic to a proper grasp of the work of art. The predictable challenge to this involves the insistence that while I have been directing attention to human performances, what is really in question in appreciating works of art is aesthetic experience. On this account, aesthetic experience is said to refer to the visual or auditory experience of the sensuous surface of the work of art. Yet who is it who ever has these curious “aesthetic experiences”? In fact, I would suppose they are never had, except by infants perhaps—surely never by serious lovers of painting, music, or literature (the latter always a difficult case for aestheticians who like talking about “sensuous surface”). The encounter with a work of art does not consist in merely hearing a succession of pretty sounds or seeing an assemblage of pleasing shapes and colors. It is as much a matter of hearing a virtuoso perform a dazzling and original interpretation of a difficult piece of music or of experiencing a new vision of a familiar subject provided by a painter. Admittedly, there is an attraction in wanting to look past these thorny complexities to concentrate on the sensuous surface, and it is the same attraction that formalism in all its various guises has always had. It is a marvelously simple view, but (alas!) art itself is even more marvelously complex. Against those who insist that an object’s status as forged is irrelevant to its artistic merit, I would hold that when we learn that the kind of achievement an art object involves has been radically misrepresented to us, it is not as though we have learned a new fact about some familiar object of aesthetic attention. To the contrary, insofar as its position as a work of art is concerned, it is no longer the same object.
1 Han van Meegeren, forger of paintings in the style of Vermeer.