Art fakes, originality, and authenticity

If I copy a famous painting to learn how it was made, have I made a fake? Not necessarily. The opening definition makes the intent to deceive decisive. Copying an image and trying to fool someone about what it is are different things. And whether the result is good art is a separate question.

The question mark in Mark Jones's title, Fake?, signals that we are going to explore the boundaries of that definition. What about a follower painting in a master's style? An artist deliberately making something look old? A student practicing by copying? These examples do not all fit neatly into two boxes labeled fake and original. We should expect a discussion of that complication, not a simple list of fraudulent artworks.

The historical survey gives us a practical question to ask: what do collectors want? If Roman collectors value earlier Greek art, someone has a reason to pass off a newer work as Greek. In medieval Europe, by contrast, devotional use mattered more than an object's origin or its creator's ingenuity. There was much less reason to pretend that the object came from a particular time or person. The incentive to fake depends on what people prize.

The Renaissance supplies two incentives: admiration for antiquity and growing interest in individual artists. You cannot make a new object genuinely ancient, but you can make it look ancient. That is what Michelangelo's patron encouraged with Sleeping Cupid: make it look buried so it will sell as an antique. Yet Michelangelo also shows us why influence and imitation are not automatically fraud. His later work could absorb earlier art and produce something original. Once his own reputation became valuable, other people imitated him. Keep those roles separate: he was encouraged to imitate antiquity, then became an artist others imitated.

The last paragraph changes the measure of authenticity. Collectors judge certain African works by function. The two masks look alike, but one has pegs for its ceremonial use and the other is a replica made for sale. Under that standard, the usable ritual mask can be authentic even if it is newer than the replica. Age alone does not settle the issue. Ask what the object was made to do.

There is a final note of doubt: would the Bambaran artists agree with the “so-called experts”? We should not convert collectors' consensus into a confirmed account of the artists' own beliefs. The ending keeps the question open by reminding us that the people applying a label may not share the makers' perspective.

So the unifying idea is not simply that people fake art to make money. That explains part of the history. The larger issue is how hard it can be to draw the line between fake and original when intention, collecting practices, and standards of authenticity differ.