Abstract
From old masters to contemporary art, questions of authenticity arise as scholarship changes and new methods for producing art force us to question what it means to say that a work of art is “authentic.” Is the painting “by” Leonardo? What makes a work produced in multiples “a Warhol”? What of “ready made” works like Duchamp’s famous urinal or Flavin’s more recent light sculptures?
Artists, philosophers and even attorneys have wrestled with issues of authenticity for ages. Their varying responses include the following:
When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it-a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree in my hand-as a kind offinal test. If the painting stands up beside a thing that man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there is a clash between the two, it is bad art.
Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered. You can’t create unless you’re willing to subordinate the creative impulse to the constriction of a form. But the learning of a craft takes time, and we all think we’re entitled to short cuts.
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of a feeling that the artist has experienced.
In my own version of the idea of “what art wants, ” the end and fulfillment of the history of art is the philosophical understanding of what art is, an understanding that is achieved in the way that understanding in each of our lives is achieved, namely, from the mistakes we make, the false paths we follow, the false images we have come to abandon until we learn wherein our limits consist, and then how to live within those limits.
We value great art most fundamentally not because the art as product enhances our lives but because it embodies a performance, a rising to artistic challenge. The object-the work of art-is wonderful because it is the upshot of a wonderful performance; it would not be as wonderfid if it were a mechanical replica or if it had been created by some freakish accident.
This Paper, however, is not concerned with such profound matters. It addresses instead the practical issue of what it means for an artwork to be authentic as a matter of law and legal practice. The stakes can nonetheless be high as an artwork’s value can increase or decrease exponentially based on a change in attribution.