1. The Autonomy of Aesthetic Experience

In May 2000, Sotheby's and Christie's found themselves selling what appeared to be the same painting – Paul Gauguin's Vase de Fleurs – at the same time. Both had been authenticated by experts but the latter turned out to have been painted by Ely Sakhai.Footnote ³ Sakhai has since been charged with eight counts of fraud relating to the sale of twenty-five works ‘by’ Gauguin, Renoir, Chagall, Monet, Klee, and others. He is not the first or last to have done such things. Van Meergeren famously forged and sold numerous Vermeers including Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus (unveiled by the Boymons Museum in Rotterdam in 1937),Footnote ⁴ and Elmyr de Hory is thought to have sold over a thousand forgeries (including Matisses, Picassos, Modiglianis, and Renoirs) to reputable art galleries worldwide.Footnote ⁵

In this essay I shall be primarily interested in replicas created without any intention to deceive. Replicas should be distinguished from artists' copies, pastiches, facsimiles, alterations, ameliorations, duplicates, twins, imitations, art that is derivative or plagiarized, and other forms of fakery.Footnote ⁶ What I say will have repercussions for the value of all of the above, but it is not my intention to spell these out.

Debates on the aesthetic value of original artwork typically focus on forgeries and/or fakes. The precise relation of forgeries to fakes is a matter of some dispute. Mark Rowe, for example, uses the two terms interchangeably, adding that ‘a painting is only a fake or forgery…if it was created in order to deceive’.Footnote ⁷ On this view, it is not enough for those in charge of its sale or exhibit to intend deceit. Both in the case of paintings and more generally, the view might plausibly fit the notion of a forgery but not that of any kind of fake (think of monopoly money, for instance). Moreover, just as all fakes are not obviously forgeries, so all forgeries are not obviously fakes. For example de Hory (who rarely signed his paintings with the name of the artist whom he was imitating) maintained that paintings made in the manner of a certain artist are not fakes, regardless of whether or not the artist intends them to deceive: ‘I made paintings in the style of a certain artist. I never copied. The only fake thing in my paintings was the signature’.Footnote ⁸

Perhaps it is better to analyse fakes in terms of authenticity. Mark Jones writes that ‘the authenticity of a work of art depends on the relation between the work itself and the artist to which it is attributed’.Footnote ⁹ Assuming we don't include artists' copies within their class, most replicas are inauthentic in this sense.Footnote ¹⁰ While my main concern is with perfect replicas of artefacts, it makes sense to begin with a brief exploration of the main positions concerning the aesthetic significance of the possibility of there being no observable differences between an original and a perfect fake in general.

One year prior to Peter Strawson, Alfred Lessing similarly argued that, from a purely aesthetic point of view, it cannot and should not matter that something is a forgery: ‘aesthetically it makes no difference whether a work of art is authentic or a forgery…the fact of forgery is important historically, biographically, perhaps legally, or…financially; but not, strictly speaking, aesthetically’.Footnote ¹¹ According to Lessing, aesthetic experience is ‘wholly autonomous’ and

If this is right, then only observable features matter aesthetically, at least when evaluating objects of art.Footnote ¹³

While it is difficult to accept that extraneous facts do not (let alone cannot) influence our aesthetic evaluation of objects of art, Lessing is right to point out that they should not and that ‘critics should have the courage of their convictions and take pride in having praised a work of beauty’.Footnote ¹⁴ No museum visitor or art collector should require authentication by art experts (fallible or otherwise) to feel secure in their aesthetic evaluations. One of de Hory's ‘Modigliani’ drawings was sold to a Minneapolis collector and another to a collector in Chicago. When he was exposed as a forger, the dealer offered the collectors their money back. The Chicago collector took it but the one from Minneapolis refused, retorting: ‘That's nice, but frankly, I bought the drawing because I liked it and it's too bad it's not a Modigliani but I'm going to keep it because we still love it’.Footnote ¹⁵

Lessing's outlook is inspired by Arthur Koestler who maintains (more realistically) that while we may find it psychologically difficult to separate our aesthetic evaluation of an object from questions of provenance, the two should be sharply distinguished. Koestler concludes that those who prize originality in cases where they cannot tell the difference are fetishistic snobs:

In the next section I shall maintain that while this is indeed often the case, it is equally true that there are occasions in which the preference for an original (which we cannot distinguish from a replica) is justified. First, however, I wish to reframe the above outlook by exploring some of the opposition to Koestler, Lessing, and Strawson.

Nelson Goodman has argued against the very notion of a perfect fake by noting that differences are in principle always discernible to someone and can emerge.Footnote ¹⁷ This may well be so, but it is neither here not there if the ‘observable differences’ in question are largely undetectable by the naked eye (and often also by the microscope) of experts, let alone by laypeople. The ability of an expert with refined machinery to distinguish between an original and a fake is tangential to what we paradigmatically call an aesthetic experience. Goodman's point is a moot one, not least in the case of museums with publicly funded open access to all.

A very different defence of originals has been offered by Ian Ground who asks us to consider a fallen meteorite that ‘happens to exactly resemble’ an outdoor sculpture by Henry Moore.Footnote ¹⁸ Ground argues that from an aesthetic point of view we are interested in the appearance of things as works of art, not mere objects and that consequently ‘its having been made by someone is an essential ingredient in the way it appears to us…it is the intended appearance which is the object of aesthetic interest’.Footnote ¹⁹ More recently, Mark Rowe has similarly argued that there is more to a work of art than the ‘manifest type’ which is constituted by its actual and/or potentially perceptible features:

Rowe gives the example of the phrase ‘pain formidable’, whose meaning changes depending on the context in which it is written (e.g. English poets vs. French bakers).Footnote ²¹ He takes this to show that the value of a work of literature (and, by extension, any work of art) cannot be assessed independently of the culture in which it was written, one which arguably also includes the intentions of the author. A similar view has been expressed by John Dewey with regard to the aesthetic experience of crafts:

Such appeals to context are not misguided; but there are three interrelated worries which seriously diminish their impact. The most celebrated defence of the view that ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art’ is that found in Beardsley and Wimsatt's ‘The Intentional Fallacy’.Footnote ²³ In their view, the sole criterion for the existence of any relevant artistic intentions is the artwork itself which can also have meanings that its author wasn't aware of.Footnote ²⁴ This theoretical stance is mirrored in the very practice of forgers like de Hory who attributed to David Stein ‘the worst sort of nonsense’ in claiming that he (that is, de Hory) would go ‘into the mind and soul of the artist’ and became Matisse when he painted Matisse:

Whatever one makes of arguments for the ‘death of the author’,Footnote ²⁶ it is impossible to deny that the purposes and intentions of the artist (e.g. to mock or pay homage in such-and-such a way) may be relevant in determining what an artwork is about and, pari passu, evaluating it qua authorial expression.Footnote ²⁷ But, as John Hyman has rightly pointed out, the sense of what is depicted can come apart from the intended reference.Footnote ²⁸ Hyman gives the example of a picture which depicts (in a non-relation-involving use of the term) a man in the uniform of a midshipman when the artist intended it to depict a man in the uniform of an ensign.Footnote ²⁹ It follows from this that there may be things that were not intended by the artist that are nonetheless ‘there to be found’ in an artwork itself, as opposed to a mere interpretation of it.Footnote ³⁰ What can be seen depends not on authorial facts but on socio-cultural norms.Footnote ³¹ Indeed, as Peter Winch puts it, ‘it would be an illusion to suppose that there could be a reader (viewer, listener, etc.) and a text (or picture, building, piece of music, etc.) without any presumptions at all.’Footnote ³²

This brings us to a formal distinction which we must make between an artwork and the process of creating a work of art.Footnote ³³ Strictly speaking it is the latter and not the former that may be evaluated as novel, derivative, daring, and so on. Our evaluation of the one should not affect our evaluation of the other anymore than the evaluation of what someone did (e.g. give money to charity) should affect our evaluation of their doing it (which may be correctly re-describable as their showing off to impress a friend), and vice versa.Footnote ³⁴ This is why – putting aside the question of where, if anywhere, the real artwork of a forger liesFootnote ³⁵ – a ‘forgery is not necessarily aesthetically inferior’.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, some re-creations are an improvement on the original (think of copies made by Renaissance masters or the compositions that Bob Dylan often built out of older folk songs).Footnote ³⁷

The basic distinction between an artwork and the process of its creation (e.g. painting as a noun and as a verb) provides ‘manifest type’ accounts with a much-needed conceptual framework which they were missing. Lessing, for example, argues that forgeries lack originality, but strictly speaking what is original or unoriginal in this sense is the act of creation and not the object created. We may talk of an artwork being daring but what this really means is that the artist was daring.

According to Dutton, all works of art can be seen as performances, and part of aesthetic appreciation involves the performative achievement of the artist. But this again only points to the fact that the achievement is an act (of creation) not an object (that has been created).Footnote ³⁸ It is, of course, possible to admire and evaluate certain (but by no means all) aspects of the creative process by observing its results, but this shouldn't give us license to conflate these two distinct objects of aesthetic evaluation. Harold Rosenberg's notion of ‘action painting’ famously tried to identify paintings with actions and/or their representations. While he was right to think that the process of creating something could be an artwork he was wrong to identify it with whatever artefact the process resulted in.Footnote ³⁹

Ethical questions raised by forgeries do not exist in the case of replicas, save that of whether museum visitors are deceived. It is natural to feel let down if you visit a gallery expecting to find an original only to discover in the small print that you have been looking at a replica. And no doubt visitor numbers of galleries will drop if originals are replaced with replicas (unless one is curating a special exhibition on the art of forgery). However our question is not a statistical one but a normative one: should people care so much about aesthetic differences they cannot discern or is our interest in originality a fetish of which we need to be cured. We won't be sufficiently prepared to answer this question until we have examined the relation between original context and purpose and that of contemporary museums.

2. Context and Purpose

What are museums for? How long is a piece of string? There is no consensus on the question of the role of museums,Footnote ⁴⁰ but we may get a general idea of the sorts of purpose associated with them by looking at the ten most popular words from a random sample of mission statements from forty significant UK museums and galleries:

Critics disagree over the hierarchy of the above purposes. In particular they debate whether or not the role of museums has or should have changed since the time of Empires. Consider this statement by the Museums Association:

This begins by a descriptive statement about museum changes but ends with a normative claim endorsing the changes in question. A similar view of contemporary museums has been defended by the Collections Trust CEO Nick Poole:

Tiffany Jenkins accepts the former but rejects the latter, claiming that cultural authority is undergoing a crisis of confidence and that museum curators should learn to once again prize knowledge and act as legislators in ‘the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge…a distinct realm, removed from social and political forces’ without the inhibition of ‘continued internal questioning’.Footnote ⁴⁴ By contrast, Douglas Worts rejects the descriptive account of contemporary museums shared by both Jenkins and the Museum Association. Worts writes: ‘The corporate notion of museums, as systematized collection-building, exhibit-making and expert information, all packaged within the context of leisure-time “edutainment”, continues to prevail in the mainstream.Footnote ⁴⁵ Worts also implies that this is a bad thing. This contention is made more explicit by Julian Spalding who, in his book The Best Art You've Never Seen, writes that in order ‘to show real works of art to people….while claiming to be the custodians of art, nearly all museums bury countless treasures in storerooms’.Footnote ⁴⁶ According to Spalding, this regrettable state of affairs is symptomatic of a more general crisis in the art world, one that is born out of a lack of communication and accessibility concern (viz. the mirror opposite of the crisis described by Jenkins).Footnote ⁴⁷

We must ask ourselves, however, whether the question which all of the above are trying to answer is a good one. Stefan Collini begins the introduction to his book What Are Universities For? with the following statement:

Nonetheless, he then allows that sometimes:

How do we decide when it is one of these times? Even if we restrict ourselves to human constructions as opposed to, say, biological organs, the following questions range from the obviously simple to the optimistically absurd:

• – What are pens for?

• – What are knives for?

• – What are buildings for?

• – What are films for?

• – What are zoos for?

• – What are friends for?

Collini believes that this is so in the case of universities. Perhaps it is also true for museums. One can perhaps see the various answers outlined above in the same vein: as not providing a definition of what museums are for but, rather, a sketch of the most important values. This will often include one or more of the following: scholarship, education (via knowledge and/or understanding), entertainment, artefact preservation, heritage preservation, the protection of honour, custody, story-telling, communication with the public, the democratization of access, the construction of national and international identities, the sharing of collections and expertise, experience (e.g. of a direct connection with one's past), inspiration, and wonder.

We have already accepted that the intentions of a creator or a culture can matter greatly, however intention is but one kind of context. Different exhibitions tell various different stories.Footnote ⁵⁰ There is a world of difference between each of the following: local museums, large national museums, cast galleries, virtual museums, hybrid museums, relic displays, and universal encyclopaedic collections (my list is far from exhaustive).

What might do, in terms of originality, for an encyclopaedic collection with a primarily educational purpose, may be highly inadequate for a relic display in a place of worship or site of religious significance. This particular truth falls out of a wider holistic outlook. A feature that makes a difference in one situation may make either no difference at all or the opposite kind of difference in another.Footnote ⁵¹ A specific amount of salt, for example, might improve an omelette but completely ruin a raspberry trifle. Without taking a stance on intricate debates between contextualists (who claim that moral and aesthetic principles are context-specific) and particularists (who deny that there can be any such principles at all), I maintain the basic holistic view that the meaning and value of any given object is dependent on the context in which it is displayed, for example, a specific gallery, exhibition, and/or museum.Footnote ⁵²

Consider, for example, Algot Lange's medicine chest from his 1911 Amazon expedition that has been on display as part of different exhibitions at Kew Gardens, the Welcome Collection, Science Museum, Horniman Museum, and the Natural History Museum. The object acquired a new significance within each of these contexts and, conversely, each of the exhibitions was changed by its inclusion or exclusion. More radically, the Parthenon friezes at the Acropolis Museum on Athens tell a very different story from those on display at the British Museum in London and, arguably, tell it to a different kind of visitor.Footnote ⁵³

Consequently, there cannot be any hard-and-fast rules determining the location of originals versus that of replicas. Rather, we must decide things on a case by case basis. It is our purposes which determine which contextual setting is best for any work of art or artefact. Often there will be no single right answer to this question, nor is there always a clear hierarchy of purpose. Still, when the two concerns are combined it will sometimes become easier to tell whether an exhibition or museum gallery is best served by an original or a replica. Would you rather see the original Mona Lisa behind a barrier and glass screen amidst a crowd of tourists in the Louvre or a perfect replica sat between pillars as Leonardo had conceived it?Footnote ⁵⁴ Knowledge of the artist's intentions doesn't always favour the original above the replica.

Nor is it always the case that only originals should be on display on original sites. Reasons why a replica might be preferable to the real thing in some cases range from the health of visitors to the preservation of cultural heritage. These two concerns have recently combined to motivate Factum Arte (a foundation which produces facsimiles ‘as part of a coherent approach to preservation and dissemination’ of cultural heritage) to build a £420,000 perfect replica of Tutankhamun's tomb, near its original location in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor.Footnote ⁵⁵ The original tomb has too much bacteria, mould, and moisture to make it safe for us to stay there long enough to appreciate it, and things will only get worse in the future. And just as the tomb puts the visitor at risk, so the daily visits of thousands of visitors (who bring in dust with them) damage the site itself, leading Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities to close down the tomb.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the name of sustainable tourism, the replica replacing it will re-create every spot of mould without being a health or heritage hazard. According to Adam Low (founder of Factum Arte), additional benefits include those of involving people in ‘understanding the problems of conservation’ and nurturing ‘a new relationship between the visitors and the long-term management of the [original] site’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Visitors will also be able to see this facsimile in better lighting and proximity, allowing them a better understanding of the tomb, and it is arguable that understanding something is crucial to being able to respond to it appropriately.Footnote ⁵⁸

Such approaches to the wonders of ancient Egypt are not new. Touring exhibitions have long had indistinguishable replicas of King Tut's mask on display.Footnote ⁵⁹ More recently, a touring World Heritage Exhibition has featured an exact anatomical recreation of Tutankhamun's mummy, alongside meticulous replicas of his ante-chamber and burial chamber with all its furniture and major treasures, as these would have appeared to Howard Carter when he discovered in them 1922.Footnote ⁶⁰ When Howard opened the tomb he immediately compromised the sterile environment of a tomb that had been unopened in 3300 years.Footnote ⁶¹ This serves as a stern reminder of the fact that we cannot speak here of Tutankhamun's treasures as if they were meant to be seen by us. The true premise behind countless mummy-based horror films is that these tombs were not designed for the purpose of being visited by future mortals and it is hubris to ignore the wishes of the ancients in this instance. While we may receive a wondrous thrill via the thought of physically connecting with the actual past and not a mere recreation of it, we must here question both our motivation and the cost at which we are willing to act upon it. Mike Pitts hits the authenticity nail on its fetishistic head:

It is simply an empirical falsehood that replicas fail to excite or inspire us. If the effect is there, we should not worry about the nature of the cause. As one journalist has put it, ‘[i]f it inspires, it inspires’.Footnote ⁶³ There are different forms of wonder, of course, and various good reasons to sometimes seek experiences such as that of a direct connection to the past. A museum dedicated to producing such experiences of wonder may require the real thing or at least the belief in the real thing. Those primarily interested in education (e.g. the encyclopaedic collections of universal museums) will, by contrast, be better served by replicas that can be touched, moved, examined, photographed, and so on. An institution or exhibition may wish to achieve both in equal measure, as is the case with many museums of natural history. Such ambitions call for a mixture of original and cast galleries. Similarly, albeit more rarely, an object may be able to play both roles without difficulty. One example of this is the 4.5 billion year-old meteorite on display next to the ticket desk of the Royal Observatory's Astronomy Centre in Greenwich. This can be touched, studied, and photographed, and yet can clearly also elicit a true sense of wonder.Footnote ⁶⁴

All else being equal, there nothing wrong with the desire to come as close to the past as is physically possible. But all else is rarely – if ever – equal, and so we must re-consider the motives and costs of our desire for authenticity. Indeed, we must re-evaluate our very ideal of authenticity.

3. Authenticity

One way of trying to understand other cultures is via museum exhibits of their art and artefacts. The traveller will seek to do this by visiting local museums. If the past is indeed a foreign country, then we might also learn much about our own cultures in this way:

If it is typically better to have originals in local museums and replicas abroad this is not because locals are better at distinguishing originals from replicas. Rather, it would be a matter of honouring a people's desire to feel a direct connection with their culture. For those expatriates and non-travellers who wish to feel a direct connection with other cultures there are the much-prized temporary touring exhibitions. That said, there are various complications related to the purposes and intentions of those who host and fund such exhibitions. In his review of a London exhibition of Bolivian artefacts, Tristan Platt expressed a worry central to many exhibitions that fit the general type:

If what one is interested in is the understanding of other cultures would decent replicas not have done the job equally well? Leonard Meyer has argued that it is naïve to insist that it should make no difference whether or not a work is forged, for this asks us to turn our backs on our cultural heritage and the value our culture places on originality. Dutton accuses Meyer of a dangerous cultural relativism. After all, other cultures may prize mimicry above originality.Footnote ⁶⁷ The question, Dutton rightly points out, is whether originality should matter. To answer this we must give good reasons for why it does matter. In the mouths of those who take a moral stance against forgeries, the value of originality is here often tied to the values of honesty and authenticity.

Those who take an aesthetic stance must ultimately claim that what makes the difference is non-observable facts. But these are not visible to the museum visitor, so even if this view is right whatever value is bestowed upon the object cannot (by definition) be detected by the museum visitor. All that matters (all else being equal between the real thing and the fake) is what we tell the visitor. This morphs back into the moral objection. I do not propose that museum galleries betray the trust of visitors. However, I do wish to question the motivation of those seeking to display originals at almost any cost. Dishonest displays of original works are more likely to put the public's trust at risk than any honest display of fakery. Hillel Schwartz has urged us to reconsider our ideals of authenticity:

Schwartz's point is not restricted to art but may be extended to all aspects of life, from the mock-meat which enables vegetarians to partake in traditional meals without betraying their ethics to the fake profiles that people create on social media to parody inauthentic public figures. We must ask ourselves what is authentic about exhibitions such as Bolivian World, or with the exhibiting of the Elgin Marbles in the Duveen Gallery of the British Museum. If ‘universal’ museums are no longer to serve as memorials of the rise of nationalism and imperialism,Footnote ⁶⁹ they would do well to consider housing more replicas.Footnote ⁷⁰