The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [97]
In its first weeks on exhibit, the new Vermeer attracted crowds to Boymans Museum. Among them could be found a thin gentleman who seemed to enjoy challenging visitors who reacted to the painting with gasps of admiration. “I can’t believe they paid half a million guilders this,” he would say, “it’s obviously a fake.” The indignation his comments provoked must have given the man, Han van Meegeren, a thrill. For was the very forger who the year before had scraped pigments off an canvas, perfected seventeenth-century paint formulas, and created prices to museums and private collectors. It was only a few days the Second World War that he was finally arrested: not for forgery, for having sold a Dutch national treasure to the enemy, since one Vermeers had ended up in the personal collection of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.
Van Meegeren confessed, and his forgeries were consigned to basement storage. But why? Here is the basic problem of forgery in the arts: if an aesthetic object has been widely admired, has given delight thousands of art lovers, and is then revealed to be a forgery or a copy, why reject it? The discovery that it is a fake does not alter the perceived qualities of the work: the colors of the Emmaus should have been just magnificent” and “luminous” after van Meegeren’s confession as before. An object’s status as original or forged is extraneous information, incidental to its intrinsic aesthetic properties. It follows that the individual who pays an enormous sum for an original but who would have interest in a reproduction that he could not tell from the original (a pen-and-ink drawing, for instance) or, worse, who chooses an aesthetically inferior original over an excellent and superior forgery copy), is confused or, as Arthur Koestler once suggested, a snob. If you can’t see a difference between two aesthetic objects, so this line of argument goes, there can be no aesthetic difference between them.
The problem of forgery has provoked some ingenious responses loso phers. Nelson Goodman, for example, called into question whole idea of basing an argument on there being no discernible difference between an original and a copy or forgery. His question is, “ to whom?” Differences between the Mona Lisa and a so-called exact copy of it may be indiscernible to an amateur but obvious to a curator. Even if the curator cannot tell the difference between original and the copy, that does not prove that noticeable differences never emerge and, later on, appear glaring not only to the curator to more innocent eyes as well. The most careful inspection of a work art—original or forged—cannot rule out that future inspections reveal something important we don’t notice today. Goodman’s idea that aesthetic perception, in becoming more informed by artistic knowledge over time, can sharpen and mature.
Goodman’s response is to some extent backed up by the van Meegeren episode. Even at the unveiling of the Emmaus, there was skepticism about its authenticity. The local agent for the New York dealer Joseph Duveen saw the painting and quietly wired back to his employer that a “rotten fake.” It may be that, among other things, Duveen’s agent noticed a feature that became more widely remarked after van Meegeren’s confession: there is a photographic quality to the faces that looks less like seventeenth-century portraiture than like black-and-white movie stills; one of the faces, in fact, displays a striking resemblance to Greta Garbo. On the one hand, this “modern” feel of the painting almost certainly gave it a subtle appeal to its initial audience. On the other hand, the very same quality reveals to our eyes the painting’s dated origin, as much as any 1930s movie betrays its origins with hairstyles, makeup, gestures,