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An Honest Display of Fakery: Replicas and the Role of Museums

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2016

Constantine Sandis
Constantine Sandis*
Affiliation:
University of Hertfordshire
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

This essay brings together questions from aesthetic theory and museum management. In particular, I relate a contextualist account of the value of copies to a pluralistic understanding of the purpose of museums. I begin by offering a new defence of the no longer fashionable view that the aesthetic (as opposed to the ethical, personal, monetary, historical, or other) value of artworks may be detached from questions regarding their provenance. My argument is partly based on a distinction between the process of creating a work of art and the artwork in question.

Next, I defend a pluralism about the purpose of museums and their exhibitions. I combine this with a pluralist account of the value of replicas which falls out of the above argument, exposing our preference for originality as being frequently fetishistic. I maintain that the importance of the provenance of artworks is relative to the specific purposes of any given exhibition or museum. Those that are primarily educational (such as encyclopaedic ones) are in many cases best served with high-quality replicas. This view may be extended to artefacts that are not artworks, such as fossils and dinosaur skeletons. Finally, I expound the variety of roles that replicas may play in museums and relate these to notions of authenticity.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 79: Philosophy and Museums: Essays in the Philosophy of Museums , October 2016 , pp. 241 - 259
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2016 

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References

1 Strawson, P. F., ‘Aesthetic Appraisal and Works of Art’, in Strawson, P. F., Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2008), 202 Google Scholar. Strawson's essay was first published in 1966.

2 Schwartz, Hillel, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 11 Google Scholar.

3 Will Bennett, ‘Two versions of Gauguin work on sale at same time’, The Telegraph, 12/02/2004. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1456587/Two-versions-of-Gauguin-work-on-sale-at-same-time.html.

4 For this and many other examples see Dutton, Denis, The Art Instinct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 177–181 Google Scholar.

5 Irving, Clifford, Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1969)Google Scholar.

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8 As quoted in Milton Esterow, ‘Fakers, Fakes & Fake Fakers’, ARTnews, 20 November 2013: http://www.artnews.com/2013/11/20/fakers-fakes-fake-fakers/.

9 Jones, Mark (ed), Fake?: The Art of Deception (London: British Museum Publications, 1990), 50 Google Scholar.

10 A potential counter-example to all this is that of ready-mades and their copies. A very different sort of worry relates to Elmyr de Hory's claim (in Orson Welles’ 1973 film F for Fake) that his Picassos are far more authentic ‘Picassos’ than some of Picasso's own work. I return to notions of authenticity in the final section of the essay.

11 Lessing, Alfred, ‘What is Wrong with a Forgery?’, in Neil, Alex and Ridley, Aaron (eds), Arguing About Art: Contemporary Philosophical Debates (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Inc, 1995), 8–21 Google Scholar. Lessing's essay was first published in 1965.

12 Ibid., 20.

13 Neil and Ridley (eds), Arguing About Art, op. cit., 6.

14 Cited in ibid., 92.

15 Esterow, ‘Fakers, Fakes & Fake Fakers’, op. cit.

16 Koestler, Arthur, ‘The Anatomy of Snobbery’, in Lasky, Melvin J. (ed), The Anchor Review, Issue 1 (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1955), 6 Google Scholar and 19, emphasis in the original.

17 Cf. Goodman, Nelson, Languages of Art, 2nd edition (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), 99–123 Google Scholar.

18 Ground, Ian, Art or Bunk? (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1989), 25–26 Google Scholar.

19 Ibid., 29.

20 Rowe, ‘The Problem of Perfect Fakes’, op. cit., 157, n.16. Rowe traces the ‘manifest type theory’ back to P. F. Strawson. I shall not here engage with Strawson's descriptive metaphysics of individuals save to say that the main point I wish to take from him would still hold true even if artworks were repeatable instances of types.

21 Ibid., 158.

22 Dewey, John, Art As Experience (New York: Penguin, 2005), 6–7 Google Scholar; cf. Eno, Brian, ‘Miraculous Cures and the Canonization of Basquiat’, in his A year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary (London: Faber and Faber, 1996)Google Scholar.

23 Beardsley, Monroe C. and Wimsatt, William K., ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, in Margolis, Joseph (ed), Philosophy Looks at the Arts, 3rd edition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, first published in 1946. A parallel ‘death of the agent’ view about the epistemic relation between intention and action may be found in Pippin's, Robert B. interpretation of Hegel in ‘Recognition and Reconciliation: Actualised Agency in Hegel's Jena Phenomenology ’, in Deligiorgi, K. (ed), Hegel: New Directions (Chesham, Bucks: Acumen, 2006), 125–142 Google Scholar. It is criticized by McDowell, John in ‘Towards a Reading of Hegel on Action in the “Reason” Chapter of the Phenomenology ’; reprinted in his Having the World in View (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 166–184 Google Scholar.

24 See also Beardsley, Monroe C., Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, 2nd edition (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1981), 20 Google Scholar.

25 Esterow, ‘Fakers, Fakes & Fake Fakers’, op. cit.

26 A variety of similar arguments against the so-called ‘intentional fallacy’ may also be found in the following works: Cavell, Stanley, ‘A Matter of Meaning It’, in Capitan, W. H. and Merrill, D. D. (eds), Art, Mind, and Religion (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967)Google Scholar; reprinted in Cavell, Stanley, Must We Mean What We Say?, 2nd edition (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 213–238 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wollheim, Richard, Art and Its Objects (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 87–90 Google Scholar; Livingstone, Paisley, Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dutton, The Art Instinct, op. cit.

27 I take this point (found in Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Anscombe) to be at the heart of Cavell's argument. But, as we shall see later, ‘expression’ is ambiguous between the thing expressed and the act of expressing it. I believe it should be problematized by the fact that aesthetic evaluations frequently conflate the two.

28 Hyman, John ‘Depiction’, in O'Hear, A. (ed), Philosophy and the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 136–140 Google Scholar.

29 Ibid.

30 I take this point from Lear's, Jonathan Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 39 Google Scholar. Cf. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, op. cit., 230.

31 In Goodman's terminology pictures only count as denoting so-and-so in a language; see Goodman, Nelson, Of Mind and Other Matters (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 90 Google Scholar.

32 Winch, Peter, ‘Text and Context’, in his Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 20 Google Scholar. Winch continues: ‘[o]utside any context whatever (if that phrase has any meaning) there would be no text to study’. Ibid., 24.

33 I first argued for this and the points that follow in Constantine Sandis, ‘Action in Life and Art’, Institut Français, 8 June 2013. http://www.culturetheque.org.uk/listen/mnwp/action-in-life.

34 The conflation between what the artist intentionally does and what is intentional (viz. her doing it) is apparent in Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, op. cit., 231ff.

35 For a defence of fakery as a form of high art, see Keats, Jonathan, Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

36 Lessing, ‘What is Wrong with a Forgery?’, op. cit., 13. What counts as a ‘purely aesthetic’ evaluation is not easy to determine and it may well be (given the point about context and presumption made above) that the very ideal in terms of which the debate is couched is a chimera. This should lead us to further question our motives and justifications for always favouring originals over replicas.

37 Comparing the faker Eric Hebborn favourably to van Meegren, for example, Denis Dutton writes ‘his Temples of Venus and Diana, by “Brueghel” or his Christ Crowned with Thorns, by “Van Dyck,” would in my opinion have done credit to their purported artists’. Dutton, The Art Instinct, op. cit., 181. For earlier incarnations of these arguments see his ‘Artistic Crimes: The Problem of Forgery in the Arts’, British Journal of Aesthetics 19/4 (1979), 303–314 Google Scholar and The Forger's Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

38 For the view that paintings are not individual artefacts but action types see Currie, Gregory, An Ontology of Art (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Thomasson, Amie L. argues against such views in her Ordinary Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There she writes: ‘reducing ordinary objects to, or identifying them with, entities of other sorts – where these have different frame-level identity conditions, and thus are of different categories – is a nonstarter’ (190). In his paper in this volume Graham Oddie argues that artworks with definite descriptions are not objects but offices. My own view (which I shall not defend here) is that our names for such works of art (as our name ‘president’) are ambiguous between the particular and the office it occupies.

39 Rosenberg, Harold, ‘The American Action Painters’ in his The Tradition of The New (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1959)Google Scholar.

40 Maurice Davies, ‘What Are Museums For?’, The Art Newspaper, Issue 224 (May 2011). http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/What-are-museums-for/23597.

41 Nick Poole, ‘What Are Museums For?’, Collections Link, 2013. http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/discover/new-perspectives/1380-what-are-museums-for.

42 http://www.museumsassociation.org/download?id=143115.

43 Poole, ‘What Are Museums For?’, op. cit.

44 Jenkins, Tiffany, Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections: the Crisis of Cultural Authority (London: Routledge, 2010)Google Scholar. For criticism, see Davies, ‘What Are Museums For?’, op. cit.

45 Douglas Worts, ‘What Are Museums For?’, WorldViews Consulting, 17 April, 2013: http://worldviewsconsulting.org/2/post/2013/04/what-are-museums-for.html.

46 Spalding, Julian, The Best Art You've Never Seen: 101 Hidden Treasures from Around the World (London: Rough Guides, 2010).

47 Spalding, Julian, The Eclipse of Art: Tackling the Crisis in Art Today (New York and London: Prestel, 2003)Google Scholar.

48 Collini, Stefan, What Are Universities For? (London: Penguin, 2012), ix Google Scholar.

49 Ibid., ix–x.

50 Storr, Robert, ‘Show and Tell’, in Marincola, Paula (ed), What Makes A Great Exhibition? (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2006)Google Scholar, 14ff. For an amusing assortment of museums with rather idiosyncratic purposes see Davies, Hunter, Behind the Scenes and the Museum of Baked Beans: My Search for Britain's Maddest Museums (London: Random House, 2010)Google Scholar. For new approaches to curating which challenge standard paradigms of the relation between artists, curators, and visitors see Martinon, Jean-Paul (ed), The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating (London: Bloomsbury, 2013)Google Scholar.

51 Dancy, Jonathan, Ethics Without Principles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 73–78 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Sandis, Constantine, ‘People, Places, and Principles’, in Holtorf, C., Pantazatos, A. and Scarre, G. (eds), Cultural Heritage, Ethics, and Contemporary Migrations (London: Routledge, 2017)Google Scholar.

53 Sandis, Constantine, ‘Two Tales of One City: Cultural Understanding and the Parthenon Scultptures’, Museum Management and Curatorship 23/1 (2008), 5–21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Spalding, The Best Art You've Never Seen, op. cit., 236–237.

55 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131026-king-tut-tomb-replica-ancient-egypt-pharaoh-archaeology-science/.

56 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/03/replica-tutankhamun-tomb-tourists. Similar problems have affected numerous ancient sites worldwide including Lascaux, Easter Island, Stonehenge; heritage tourism has a lot to answer for.

57 Adam Low in National Geographic article, op. cit.

58 Winch, ‘Text and Context’, op. cit., 28.

59 This mask forms one of the central examples of Graham Oddie's contribution to this volume.

60 http://www.tutankhamun-exhibition.co.uk.

61 http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/jan/17/tutankhamun-tomb-to-close.

62 Ibid.

63 Jonathan Jones ‘Why Egyptian replicas are as good as the real thing’, The Guardian 24/10/2010. http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/oct/24/egyptian-replicas-manchester-tutankhamun. The more general point is made by Brian Eno in his defence of art-works as triggers of experience (a term he credits to Roy Ascott), in his ‘Miraculous Cures and the Canonization of Basquiat’, op. cit.

64 See Spalding, Justin, The Art of Wonder: A History of Seeing (New York and London: Prestel, 2005)Google Scholar. For a cross-disciplinary survey of the notion of wonder see Vasalou, Sophia (ed), Practices of Wonder: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012)Google Scholar. See also Beth Lord's contribution to this volume.

65 http://www.museumsassociation.org/download?id=143115.

66 Platt, Tristan, ‘What Are Museums For?: Museums, Objects and Representation’, Anthropology Today 3/4 (1987), 13 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Dutton, The Art Instinct, op. cit., 184.

68 Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy, op. cit., 17.

69 Dewey, Art As Experience, op. cit., 8.

70 This paper was first presented at the Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Conference ‘Philosophy and Museums: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Ontology’ at the University of Glasgow. and the Burrell Collection, 24–26 July 2013. Many thanks to all the organizers and participants, particularly Anna Bergqvist, Victoria Harrison, Ivan Gaskell, Garry Hagberg, Michael Levine, Graham Oddie, Andreas Pantazatos, and Charles Taliaferro. This chapter has also benefitted from discussions with Shahin Bekhradnia, Andreas Lind and Catherine Rowett.