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By Root 1002 0

Suppose someone hypothesizes, “We just disapprove of Meegeren because of our overweening cultural interest in originality and the cult of genius. If we were not so constrained by such cultural values, then van Meegeren would have been praised rather than condemned for his ‘Vermeer’ paintings.” But this hypothesis only thinks through half the issue: if we didn’t have these cultural values, then never have wasted time painting his forgeries. It is not as though forgery would be tolerated in this hypothesized world: it could not exist as practice in the first place. The hypothesis is rather like saying, “Bank robbery is only a crime because of the cultural value we place on money.” It is not that if we didn’t place value on money, then bank robbery would okay: if we didn’t value money, banks wouldn’t even bother to keep would people rob it from them.

Again, take an ordinary work practice requiring the competent but routine application of methods to solve problems: plumbing. Plumbers not prohibited from “forging” each other’s work. If the very idea forgery in plumbing strikes us as outlandish, it is not because our culture tolerates forger-plumbers but not forger-artists. Plumbers do not their work or take any particular personal credit for it (“Architecture Frank Gehry, plumbing by Herman O’Reilly”); forgery therefore has relevance in plumbing. Nor is this just a question of money, since many plumbers are better paid for their work than artists. It rather has to with something special that distinguishes art from other productive practices. It is that something special that makes the issue of forgery arresting in a way that other forms of fraud are not. If Joyce Hatto had figured a way to embezzle money from other pianists’ bank accounts, it would have been an interesting story in the annals of crime. But her plagiarism was a peculiarly artistic crime, fascinating to us ways that go beyond ordinary fraud. Her victims are not just other any more than the victims of van Meegeren or Hebborn are buyers of their paintings. For all three of these fraudsters, their audiences victims.

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My own first attack on this problem, published in 1979, used what was at that time a wholly imaginary example:

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 per for mance!” Jones responds with a sigh. “Yeah, it was electric all right. Or to be more precise, was electronic. He recorded the music at practice tempo engineers speeded it up on a rotating head recorder.” Poor Smith—his enthusiasm evaporates.

Rotating head recorders are a 1960s technology for changing speed without altering pitch (by the 1990s, Joyce Hatto’s husband was able tweak the speed of her recordings by digital means). My example, however, was intended to point to a general fact about aesthetic response, relevant both to plagiarism and electronic alteration: all art—and not the so-called performing arts—incorporates at some level the idea per for mance. Every artistic act—composing a fugue, writing a sonnet, weaving a basket, painting a portrait—is a performance, and is undertaken against a backdrop of normal expectations for producing work one kind or another. Some of these expectations involve the technical properties of artistic media: what you can normally accomplish molding clay, applying pigments to a canvas, carving oak, or drawing a horse hair bow across a taut string. But artistic perperformances also take place against stylistic or historical backdrops: works of art are created in genres and during stylistic epochs that condition what will count as inventiveness, audacity, timidity, eloquence, banality, wit, or vulgarity in work of art.

To understand a work of art we must have some idea of the limitations, technical and conventional, within which the artist works— sense of the challenges an artist faces. For example, it may be perfectly