The Art of Deception, The Deception of Art

“ Ethically, there is a strict line drawn between the imitator and the forger, but in practice this line is by no means rigid. Many imitators place their goods before the public as imitations; others tacitly permit their work to be sold as genuinely antique, influenced no doubt by the fact that though possibly12 the imitation and the original may possess equal merit, the one is handicapped by modernity, the other is hallowed by age. The inexperienced and unwary collector is in most cases the innocent originator of fraud; if there were no buyer there would be no seller. ”

“ Many literary forgeries have been pious frauds, perpetrated in the interests of a church, a priesthood, or a dogma. Then we have frauds of greed, as if, for example, a forger should offer his wares for a million of money to the British Museum ”

“ A former curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum used to pay due tribute to the art of good imitators and fakers, who had succeeded in deceiving the vigilant eye of the guardians of museums, by stating that imitations are really too good to be mistaken for antiques, much better, indeed, than some of the examples of the art they would falsify. ”

“ These are the sheets over which experts shake their heads and go away muttering, to return for councils and deliberations and sometimes total disagreement. There exists in an American collection a certain Kiyonaga print which half a dozen experts believe to be a modern fraud, though another half-dozen are prepared to defend its authenticity until Judgment Day. Work of this quality is expensive to produce, and the price asked for it is therefore always high. ”

“ To speak of over-restoration is in such cases to use a euphemism. We can offer an example showing how this over-restoration of objects is nothing but a form of faking highly flavoured with different varieties of deception. A rich American bought a marble statue some years ago representing a famous Roman empress. It was bought not only because the Roman art appealed to him but as the portrait of that particular Roman empress. As a matter of fact, the whole statue had been faked by the addition of new portions to a headless, limbless torso, which was the only genuinely antique part. ”

“ We must repeat that in sculpture also, faking borrows largely from the art of restoring. Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that nearly all branches of the faker’s art turn for help to the restorer’s methods. And here again, as in painting, we are also immediately confronted by two forms of trickery; one is the creation of a modern object in imitation of the antique so as to deceive the collector, and the other the reconstruction of some fantastic piece of forgery from an inferior object, or one greatly damaged by over-restoration. ”

“ In this way the art of restoring has proved a bridge to fakery.
Restoration at its best and in the true artistic spirit never consents to falsify any part of the work. Lies, even in art, no matter how well they may be told, remain lies. ”

“ Consequently the faker, who inevitably follows suit, must have a knowledge of history in order to avoid historical blunders, he must be acquainted with particulars connected with the personage whose autograph is to be forged, and above all must be an expert imitator of other people’s hand-writing, in fact in him the art of forging signatures must be brought to the highest perfection, for here documents are to be forged, a succession of calligraphic characters and idiosyncrasies far more difficult of execution than a mere signature on a false cheque. ”

“ He has nothing to gain by it all, they say; he does not make money, like the forger of a cheque; he can seldom sell his forgery to advantage, as the latest biblical forger, Shapira, of the sham manuscript gospel, discovered. He merely poisons the very wells of history and throws doubt on all original “sources.” People who reason thus forget that every artist takes joy in his art, and that all art is imitation. The art of the forger is to imitate ancient manuscripts and inscriptions. L’Art pour l’art is his motto. He revels in his own cleverness and power of deceiving others. ”

“ Living in obscurity, without the capital or sagacity to make himself known to the public, he is at the mercy of those who are interested in keeping him in privacy and buying his artistic labors at the wages of a clodhopper. His own responsibility goes not beyond fulfilling orders for the imitation of certain objects, the process of which he frankly explains to the inquisitive visitor. But, once in dishonest hands, antiquity and authenticity replace modernism and imitation. ”

“ Later, the growth of scientific knowledge and religious skepticism spoiled this market; while recognition of the artist as an individual and the development of art collections stimulated production of forgeries imitating the work of particular artists or of particular epochs. ”

“ Falsehood is the principle of all that is beautiful and of good report amongst men. Do we not see winged figures and mythical pictures adorning their gardens, their palaces, and their temples? They lend a willing ear only to the lies of the poets. What makes you wish to destroy falsehood and to seek truth? Such an enterprise can only be inspired by decadent curiosity and culpable intellectual temerity. It is an attempt against the moral nature of man and the laws of society. ”

“ Imagine a painter apologizing for having taken a bend of the Thames or a Highland glen some man had used before. Of course, if one makes a copy of a picture and exhibits it as his own, that is fraud, and the work is certain to be poor. One must respect another artist's labour, which is the ground of his copyright. But if one makes a 'bit' of life as old as Aristophanes or Horace his own, by passing it through his own fancy and turning it out in his own style, then it is ever new. ”

“ That inquiry recognizes the value in using existing materials to fashion something new. And so too, this Court—from Justice Story’s time to two Terms ago—has known that it is through such iterative processes that knowledge accumulates and art flourishes. But not anymore. The majority’s decision is no “continuation” of “existing copyright law.” Ante, at 37. In declining to acknowledge the importance of transformative copying, the Court today, and for the first time, turns its back on how creativity works. ”

“ Recall, payments like these are incentives for artists to create original works in the first place. Nor will the Court’s decision, which is consistent with longstanding principles of fair use, snuff out the light of Western civilization, returning us to the Dark Ages of a world without Titian, Shakespeare, or Richard Rodgers. The dissent goes on at length about the basic premise that copyright (like other forms of intellectual property) involves a tradeoff between stimulating innovative activity, on the one hand, and allowing follow-on innovation, on the other. ”

“ Finally, art, considered as a means, seems to labour under this defect of form, that, supposing it to be subordinated to serious ends, and to produce results of importance, still the means employed by art for such purposes is deception. For beauty has its being [Pg 8] in appearance. [16] Now, it will readily be admitted that an aim which is real and true in itself ought not to be attained by deception, and if it does here and there achieve some success in this way, that can only be the case to a limited extent, and even then deception cannot approve itself as the right means. ”

“ When the imagination deceives, it becomes madness. It is a noble faculty so long as it confesses its own ideality; when it ceases to confess this, it is insanity. All the difference lies in the fact of the confession, in there being no deception. It is necessary to our rank as spiritual creatures, that we should be able to invent and to behold what is not; and to our rank as moral creatures, that we should know and confess at the same time that it is not.
IV. Again, it might be thought, and has been thought, that the whole art of painting is nothing else than an endeavour to deceive. ”

“ To the creator, whether of prose, of poem, of melody, picture, or statue, who is sincere in all he creates, to whom conscious imitation would have all the baseness of a forgery, and to whom sincerity and originality are the essence of creative talent, the fraud of imitation disgusts and offends as it cannot do the mere outsider. Such disgust, such offence, are no more envy or jealousy than the sublime fury of the 84storming-party is the secret stabbing of the hired bravo. ”

“ Thus, a copy, however exact, may reveal itself as lacking the coherence and the feeling which inspired the original; and the most skillful imitation of some older work may be recognized as a creation of its own time. Nobody can completely divorce himself from the prevailing thoughts, opinions, assumptions, feelings, and standards of his own period; and inevitably these will color whatever he produces, whether he be a forger or an original artist. ”

“ But an artist should not be contented with this only; he should enter into a competition with his original, and endeavour to improve what he is appropriating to his own work. Such imitation is so far from having anything in it of the servility of plagiarism, that it is a perpetual exercise of the mind, a continual invention. ”

“ Would it not involve the expectation that the artistic value would be the greater, the more the ideal of imitation is approached? A perfect imitation which looks exactly like the original would give us the highest art. Yet every page in the history of art tells us the opposite. We admire the marble statue and we despise as inartistic the colored wax figures. ”

“ Because they are expressions of nature, and because the copying of the human body, of trees, clouds, and the like is an indispensable part of their practice, painting and sculpture have seemed to give support to the theory of art as imitation. Yet, although the activity of imitation is a means to the creation of picture and statue, the mere fact of being a copy is not the purpose of the completed work nor the ground of our pleasure in it. ”

“ The specimens he acquires are almost if not quite as good from an artistic or a technical point of view as the originals they simulate, and though more costly than frankly modern objects, they are cheaper than genuine old ones. The artist is the chief sufferer, since he is obliged to efface himself for the sake of a fraud, and the art since its progress is checked for the sake of dishonest gain. ”

“ They may not deceive at the present day, but the danger is that the longer they are allowed to remain, the more they will tone down until they have acquired that specious air of antiquity which may enable them to pass for genuine, until some expert will detect the fraud, and perhaps be provoked on their account to call in question the authenticity of the whole screen into which they have become thus unwarrantably intruders. ”

“ In the world of art, art lovers and collectors, to be well deceived means to be living in a fool’s paradise, a most costly dwelling which promises no eternal joy. On the contrary, the happiness derived from being well deceived in this case is generally not only of very short duration but inflicts smarting wounds to pride and pocket. ”

“ And our author says the same—"Whenever the work is seen to resemble something which we know it is not, we receive what I call an idea of imitation." Again—"Now, two things are requisite to our complete and most pleasurable perception of this: first, that the resemblance be so perfect as to amount to deception; secondly, that there be some means of proving at the same moment that it is a deception." He justly considers "the pleasures resulting from imitation the most contemptible that can be received from art." ”

“ We shall gradually learn to distinguish originality and sincerity from the decrepitudes of imitation and palsies of repetition; but it will be only in hopelessness to recognize the truth, that architecture and painting can be "restored" when the dead can be raised,—and not till then. ”

“ Vital art is a necessity, and vital art is stifled by culture, which insists that artists shall respect the standards, or, to put it bluntly, shall imitate old masters.
The cultured, therefore, who expect in every picture at least some reference to a familiar masterpiece, create, unconsciously enough, a thoroughly unwholesome atmosphere. For they are rich and patronising and liberal. They are the very innocent but natural enemies of originality, for an original work is the touchstone that exposes educated taste masquerading as sensibility. ”

“ Why then does186 modernity in art arouse, not only in old Europe, but also, and perhaps more, in young America, so much diffidence and mistrust? Why do we, notwithstanding the attempts which modern artists make to emulate the ancients or to create new things, turn to the past when we want to possess or enjoy something really beautiful? May this contradiction be the effort of a last surviving prejudice? For centuries, man was educated to consider all antique things, only because they were antique, preferable to modern ones. ”

“ One of the brightest signs for American painting to-day is the fact that it is now found profitable to make and sell forgeries of the works of our most distinguished modern artists—even living ones. This is a new and encouraging situation. A few years ago it was hardly worth a forger's time to make, say, a false Hassam, when he might just as well be making a Corot—which reminds me of an amusing thing a painter said to me the other day.
We were passing through an art gallery, when I happened to see at the end of one room three canvases in the familiar manner of Corot. ”