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By Root 1050 0

to remark that in a painting of the Madonna the pale pink of Virgin’s robe contrasts pleasantly with the light blue-gray of her cloak. But is it is also relevant to know that an artist is working within a canon fifteenth-century Italian artists did) according to which the must be some shade of red and the cloak must be blue. The demand juxtapose fundamentally warm and cool colors poses difficulties for harmony between robe and cloak, in the face of which Ghirlandaio reduce the size of the cloak and tone it down with gray, and Perug-ino may depict the cloak thrown over the Virgin’s knees and allow cloak. To say that the resulting arrangement of colors is pleasing may enough. But a fuller appreciation and understanding of these works art would involve recognizing how the pleasing harmony is a to a problem, a demand convention places on the artist.

To know whether an artistic performance succeeds or fails requires we know what counts as success or failure in any performance context. Music critics will consider a pianist’s tone, phrasing, tempo, accuracy, and ability to sustain a line or build to a climax. Speed and brilliance may be important considerations, which is not to say the fastest per for mance will be the best. But behind these considerations unstated assumption: that is it one person’s ten unaided fingers that produce the sounds. The excitement a virtuoso pianist generates with glittering shower of notes is intrinsically connected with this fact. An aurally identical experience that is electronically synthesized can never dazzle us in the same way: sound synthesizers can produce individual notes as fast as you please, while pianists cannot. Built into the thrill hearing a virtuoso is admiration for what the performance represents human achievement. Forgery and other forms of fakery in the arts misrepresent the nature of the performance and so misrepresent achievement.

Of course, technologies change, and what might be a performance type can develop into something different. There might come time, for instance, when electronically produced prestissimos will accepted and be what will count as achievement in a recorded performance. When that day arrives, we will no longer say things like, “Didn’t she play that run beautifully?” but rather, “Doesn’t Sony marvelous tempo engineering?” We may expect that engineers will given credit on recordings, not for having faithfully reproduced sounds the artist has produced, but for having altered the sounds in ways previously left to the performer. There is no principled reason to oppose this, any more than we ought to oppose recording Götterdämmerung separate sessions on various days. But just as we ought to know that resulting recording will feature voices that sustain their power throughout the whole work in ways that would be impossible in any live per-for mance, so we ought to know that the manipulated piano recording alone could never produce. This may well be a music world of beautiful sounds, but it will no longer be a world of thrilling keyboard virtuosity.

VI

The example of the faked piano recording nicely illustrates a striking psychological effect: a shock, a sense of deflation and betrayal, in finding that what you thought was brilliant virtuosity was only an engineer twiddling a dial. Aesthetic theory can trace out the implications of such aesthetic intuitions for critical discourse, but it typically says nothing about the sources of the intuitions themselves. For this, we must turn evolved interests and emotions toward works of art. As with the fallacy, the paradoxes of forgery are generated by conflicting adaptive functions of works of art. On the one hand, we have the natural impulse to treat the work of art in a disinterested or decoupled manner, as an object that gives plea sure in the imagination. On the other hand, and in ways that conflict with this first aspect, works of art displays, Darwinian fitness tests, and dependent on an innate information system that emerged in sexual selection.

The Kantian standpoint of disinterested contemplation, which has