ABSTRACT
Underlying much discussion of forgery is this question: Why do people prefer a genuine work of art to a copy when they cannot tell the difference between the two? To put the question in its strongest form, suppose not just the average viewer, but even the greatest experts will never be able to see any difference between them. In this case, could there possibly be a justification to prefer the original work? Some people claim that the reasons to prefer the original are not aesthetic but moral:
because exact copies are easily mistaken for originals they can be used to deceive. But the moral explanation cannot account for why we prefer to see the original even when there is no deception involved, that is, when the copy is clearly labeled as such. (From here on a nondeceptive copy will be called a “fake,” to distinguish it from a “forgery,” which is intended to deceive.) If, to accommodate the crowds, the Mona Lisa and a high-quality, clearly labeled copy were hanging in different parts of the Louvre, most of us would still choose to line up in front of the real thing; what seems odd is that we would do so even though we wouldn’t be able to tell if the works were switched.
In resorting to the moral (nonaesthetic) explanation for the preference for originals, it is assumed that there could not possibly be any aesthetic grounds for such a preference. Underlying this assumption is the “appearance theory,” the view that the aesthetic value of an artwork depends “solely on the visual appearance of the painting” (Meiland 1983: 116). This view, however, is not so obviously true as it may seem; those who reject it claim that a work’s aesthetic interest depends not just on appearance but also on how an art object was made, when, by whom and for what cultural purpose. Richard Wollheim has more recently argued against a general version of the appearance theory, which applies to literature and music as well as to paintings. What he calls the “Scrutiny Thesis” is the view that to evaluate a work of art we should not draw on external, contextual or cultural knowledge, but confine ourselves to direct examination of an artwork, whether looking at, listening to or reading it (Wollheim 1993a: 132-33). The appearance theory is associated with the formalism of the early twentieth-
century art critics Clive Bell and Roger Fry. Enthusiastic about abstract painting,
they claimed that an artwork’s aesthetic interest derives entirely from abstract features of its appearance, such as a painting’s line, color and spatial organization (Bell 1992: 123-24). This led Bell to claim that the aesthetic response is independent of all knowledge of the world a viewer brings to a work. If this is so, the fact that a work is a forgery or a fake could not possibly affect its aesthetic value. But this would mean that our response to one of the late, near-formless Monet paintings of water lilies would be the same whether we recognized it as a picture of water lilies or mistook it for an abstract work. Given how dramatically the spatial experience changes when we do come to recognize the flowers, this seems implausible. Because figurative content has such a powerful impact, few accept Bell’s extreme formalism. Bell’s account was nonetheless notable as an attempt to distinguish features that are universally part of the appearance of a work of art (abstract shapes, lines and colors) from features that vary depending on external or contextual knowledge (everything else including figurative content). If we decide that Bell’s account of a work’s universal content is too narrow, then we face the problem of where else to draw a line between what anyone would perceive regardless of cultural context and what is perceived only with certain background knowledge. To those in a desert culture who have never seen a water lily or a Monet painting, a late Monet work might well appear abstract without added background information. For those who are steeped in Monet and his culture, the flowers are discovered simply by looking. Contextualist arguments against the appearance theory come in two main varieties.
One variety, the kind Wollheim espouses, claims broadly that all perception (aesthetic or not) is shaped by what the perceiver knows. Another variety points to specific features that do not affect the way a painting looks, but that do affect its aesthetic value, such as the originality of a work.
