In Praise of Art Forgeries

Our first instinct is to marvel at the forgers’ skill and lament their misdeeds. But while forgery is very clearly an economic crime, it may not always be an artistic or aesthetic one. Forgers can even be an art lover’s friend.

Sometimes, they give us works that great artists simply didn’t get around to making. If a fake is good enough to fool experts, then it’s good enough to give the rest of us pleasure, even insight. The late Swiss collector Ernst Beyeler called a fake Rothko from Queens a “sublime unknown masterwork” in 2005 and hung it in his namesake museum. Why not think of that picture as the sublime masterwork that Rothko happened not to have got around to? Is it a bad thing if thousands more people in China get to own works by the great modern master Qi Baishi — even if the works they own aren’t actually by him? In some ways, they are by him, in the profound sense that they almost perfectly capture his unique contribution to art. If they didn’t, no one would imagine he’d made them.

Forgers also remind us that great art depends on the ideas of artists, not necessarily on their actual hands. Many wonderful works of art by figures such as Titian, Rembrandt and Rubens were executed partly or even mostly by their studio assistants, which doesn’t make them any less expressive of Titian or Rembrandt’s innovations. For nearly two decades, our forger in Queens managed to fool both the dealers at Knoedler and their art-savvy clients, and the only reason his fakes could exist and succeed is because the true achievement of Pollock and Rothko was to come up with a set of ideas and procedures for making art. The faker could be considered a faithful assistant of theirs who happened to arrive after they’d died; ditto the hundreds of forgers of Qi Baishi.

We may also want to bless forgers for helping to tame our absurd art market. If speculators eventually are scared off by the danger of being stuck with fakes, prices may fall.

In the last decade, reported revenues from the Chinese auction market have expanded ninefold, now higher than those of its American counterpart. Records have been set for Chinese masters that compete with the West’s already inflated prices for Warhol and Picasso — if such records even end up holding, given some buyers who are refusing to pay because of doubts about authenticity.

In a market depressed and made anxious by fakes, investors and private collectors may start pulling out, leaving more room for museums to buy at prices they can afford, which in turn would be good news for any art lover who depends on our public collections. And, since museums don’t have to think about net worth and reselling (let’s forget the Detroit case for a moment), they can live with the risk of maybe having bought a fake. Their audience might still enjoy and learn from the new “Rothko” in the collection.

Our current market, geared toward the ultra-wealthy, is helping few and hurting many. It stomps down all the emerging and midlevel dealers, artists, curators and even collectors who can’t play in the big-money game. It’s also hurting all the art lovers, current and future, who deserve work that’s conceived to address artistic issues, not to sell well to robber barons. If forgers can help burst our art bubble, blessings be upon them.

Finally, forgers teach us to doubt connoisseurs. There’s a myth out there, propagated by the market and some strains of academe, that certain thoroughbred experts can smell authentic art at 100 yards. After more than a century of bad attributions, reattributions and long-lived fakes, you’d think we would know better than to believe in such fantasy creatures. The truth is, the connoisseur’s eye works brilliantly in that vast majority of attributions where an artwork comes without a name attached but clearly has a single maker’s signature look. And then that eye fails utterly in those remaining, more iffy cases where a piece looks quite like some artist’s work, but may almost as easily be by someone else — including a forger.

Every time an expert is fooled by a fake, the faker has once again taught us that connoisseurship is not to be trusted. More important, we’re reminded that the whole idea of a unique artistic “touch,” along with the ideal of “authenticity” that goes with it, may be beside the point in our understanding of art.

An essay by Alexander Nagel, a professor of Renaissance art at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, argues that “forgery” is a concept that barely existed in Western art before around 1500, when the art market was invented and a new cast of players who came to be known as “dealers,” “collectors,” “connoisseurs” — and forgers — was born. Before that moment a copy could stand in perfectly well for an earlier work of art, so long as it transmitted the same “essential content,” as Mr. Nagel puts it, and could fill the same religious or commemorative functions. When a great Byzantine icon was copied, the new version was felt to have the same relationship to its divine subject as the older one, and so could do the same cultural work. What would it mean to “forge” a picture, in a world where originals and copies could be interchanged?

Even as far back as ancient Rome, Mr. Nagel shows, it was considered utterly normal to copy the Greek statues of Praxiteles or Polyclitus, even while altering them. Patrons wanted access to the larger aesthetic ideas and ideals of their artistic geniuses; they didn’t think of works of art “as singularities, as unrepeatable performances by an author,” as Mr. Nagel puts it.

Some of the 20th century’s most important creators set out to undermine ideas of unique, authentic, hand-touched works of art. Precisely 100 years ago, when Marcel Duchamp began presenting store-bought bicycle wheels, urinals and bottle racks as ready-made sculptures, he was also inviting others to buy and show similar masterworks. A half-century later, Andy Warhol was famously freewheeling when it came to notions of authenticity: You could never tell, and weren’t supposed to know, how much if any of a Warhol painting had actually been made by him versus by some acolyte in his art Factory. (In interviews, Warhol would sometimes attribute his works to others even when he’d executed them himself.) The art market can’t stand the slippages such ideas introduce, and insists on selling Warhols and Duchamps the way you’d sell a Lincoln autograph. Forgers, on the other hand, help preserve modern art’s productive uncertainty.