Fake art
Let's be real
I naively still cling to the notion that aesthetics is the core of art even though I know better.
I liked Roger Fry's idea of 'significant form' that could be recognized not really described.
An old friend took me to the art gallery for a Munch exhibit. Hah! Joe said, "Munch made a mistake" and showed me. I stood and looked and he blocked my vision so that a part of the composition was not seen. It transformed the picture for the better.
Clive Bell thought that we need to know that something was made for us to appreciate.
Gorgeous sunsets or cute kittens didn't qualify as art.
This led me to the idea of the aesthetic experience; it's a kind of feedback loop where the viewer looks and has a thought which causes a fresh look which causes a new thought . . . .
I think that it is one of the measures of art; it's hard to get out of that loop with great art..
Jasper Johns was once asked how he made a picture.
I paraphrase: Its simple he said. You do something and then you do something else and carry on like that until you're done.
That's the feedback loop from an artist's perspective.
How could art be possibly faked then? After all - either you get into the loop or you don't.
The aesthetic experience is informed by much more than the particular thing the viewer is looking at. What the viewer already knows is a part of the experience. So the location is important - art seems different in a major gallery than when tacked to a tree.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/norval-morrisseau-art-fraud-sentencing-1.7059535
Norval Morriseau was a popular Canadian artist. He had a clean colorful style that was easy to imitate. There was a ring of fraudsters producing hundreds of pictures and passing them off as 'authentic' Morriseau's. The ringleader is now jailed.
Fraud is a bad thing. But somehow a baby is being tossed with the bathwater here; The fact that the pictures were actually good enough to sell for thousands of dollars is not being considered.
Salvador Dali once sold signed blank sheets of paper - the signature was the only significant thing. People could put their own work on the sheet and have an 'authentic' Dali.
When I was a printmaker I was making "original prints". The idea contrasted with the idea of prints that were mass produced copies of other work - those were mere posters. Reproductions can be fabulously accurate, down to physical brushstrokes. They can carry the visual effect of the original but are still just reproductions - valueless in the art world.
The thing that distinguished an original print from a reproduction was that the artist made the image on the plate or stone or whatever and that each print was as original as any of the others. Original prints were done as small editions with each one signed and numbered by the artist. Original prints were printed by hand and the plate would be destroyed. The plate wasn't considered the original for the image. After all, the final picture might have been made using many plates with different colours.
At the time I earned my living as a commercial printer as well as working on my own prints in the studio at night. I knew the printing trade inside out. I could make original prints in editions of tens of thousands if I wanted. I did a couple of test runs of a thousand or so.
At the studio I was talking about how it might be better to use the music model for distributing art rather than the painting model. Music is pretty cheap for the consumer. Music is consumed because people like it and bragging rights don't come into it much. This didn't go over well with my fellow printmakers.
To my astonishment, Buffy Saint Marie was revealed to be a pretendian - a person claiming a first nations ancestry when they had settler parents. What kind of got lost in the kerfuffle was that Buffy was an award winning musician for decades.
There have been quite a few similar cases here in Canada. People who made up a life story and advanced to prominent positions only to get outed as fake.
My naivete about art was based on not understanding the social dimension of art. That social dimension is a very significant part of the aesthetic experience, even for me. It's the social dimension that lets artists prosper (if they are lucky) and be able to have the time and resources for ambitious projects. But the social dimension also makes art vulnerable to social predators like psychopaths who make fake art.
What do you think
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.