by Many years ago I met a man in a pub in Bloomsbury, who said he worked in the British Museum. He told me that every individual object that was issued in the museum was a replica and that all the original artifacts were locked up to maintain storage.
I was shocked and challenged him. It could certainly not be the case that millions of annual visitors to the British Museum experienced in no way tangible, concrete treasures of human history, but the flat Simulacra of the replicas. I might even use the term “fraud”.
But on my way home that night I started to question my own experiences in the British Museum. I wondered what it meant when the Greek water glass, from which I was moved and represented a woman who might have bent Sappho about a scroll, was actually a worthless copy. Did that have the experience less real?
Later I googled that none of what the man had told me was true. The artifacts in the British Museum Are Original, unless otherwise expressly stated. It was the man who claimed to work there who was a fake.
So my years of fascination for the question of counterfeits and the way we feel in their presence. When this Greek water glass had Was a fake, I never knew how to look only with an inexperienced but appreciative eye. Would it devalue my overwhelming feeling of the connection to the past the moment I saw it? This is one of the questions that caused me to write my new novel, the original, about counterfeits and the people who fall in love with them. According to an art fuse at the end of the 19th century, the book is about making false art, false stories and false people and believing. I wanted to think in history that we live in a world that is sometimes increasingly wrong.
Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has suggested that about 40% of the works of art standing for sale are fake. Yan Walther, head of the expert institute for visual arts, puts the number 50%.
Last month, the debate about the authenticity of Rubens’ Samson and Delilah, which was bought by the National Gallery for 2.5 million GBP in 1980. The painting from 1609 or 1610 has been lost for centuries and since his arrival in the National Gallery has been suspended repeated controversy about his authenticity. Are the brush strokes too rough, the colors too unusual? Is the composition too different from copies of the original that were made at the time of the time? In an interview with The Guardian, the former curator of the National Gallery, Christopher Brown, who supervised her original acquisition, seemed that the gallery itself was responsible for replacing the background of the painting. The National Gallery replied with the words: “Samson and Delilah have long been accepted as a masterpiece by Peter Paul Rubens. Not a single Rubens specialist has undoubtedly been from Rubens. A complete discussion of the panel was published by Joyce Plester, and David Bomford in the technical bulletin of the gallery, as the manifolds of the gallery for the gallery for the Galerie The gallery was responsible for the scales of the gallery.
This recent controversy follows a study that was carried out a few years earlier, in which a AI analysis of the brush stroke pattern showed that the probability of 90% was fake the painting. I visited the painting after this story had broken after I had developed a slight obsession with questions of authenticity until then. It was autumn 2021 and we all still set ourselves to the existence in the world about the locks. Seeing a painting in the meat felt new; The colors Vivid: Delilah’s illuminated throat, Samson’s shiny muscles, the shadowy scissors at the moment his hair is cut. The texture of this questionable brush strokes was exciting. I stood in front of the painting and wanted it to be real because I liked it so much.
A study from 2014 published in the Leonardo magazine has tested how the belief in authenticity in art influences our perception. The participants were shown paintings with the name of originals or incorrectly copies and then asked to evaluate their experiences. Paintings that were referred to as copies were consistently than less moving, less well manufactured, less well composed and the work of less talented artists. It is a strong example of the extent to which our art experience is shaped by the story that is told to us: the value we attach to authenticity, reason, perception, our own eyes. A copy is automatically worse, even if it is not really a copy.
The same peculiarity of human impulse appears in all possible other contexts. There are these expert sommeliers who are not in the investigations under the investigation conditions in order to recognize the difference between cheap and expensive wine. So-called “dupes” of high-end fashion items are part of the ecosystem of the clothing industry. The Internet is full of videos of VOX pops in which people do not identify if they are faced with two almost identical outfits, the tens of thousands of costs and the thousands of pounds. People are quite unable to understand our world without context without history.
If you hike through the Museum of Art Ficks in Vienna, an institution that is devoted to the art of falsification, what they influence the most, is how not convincing everything is, how far and dilapidated the forgeries look. The colors look wrong. The materials look cheap. The brush strokes look lazy and the way the color adheres to the screens appear inhumane. But how could these pieces look different and are housed in the Museum of Art Fakes? Han van Meegeren’s Vermeser, once “the best jewels of the master of the master”, appear from thisabile context, which once had “the best jewels of the master”, pretty, almost beyond. Getting from the Museum of Art Fakes and going directly to the Kunsthistorisches Museum from Vienna to see works by Vermeer and Rubens is an emerging experience: You feel so sure to look at these paintings so that you are in the presence of originals. Then think about how you could appear if you were exhibited in the modest cellar gallery of the Museum of Art Fakes and this certainty begins to fade.
It is noteworthy that we have turned to AI to help ourselves to solve our authenticity issues (in the people in whom people can fulfill themselves, the artificial intelligence of brushstroke patterns can distill only mere data points) if AI also creates counterfeits at previously unimaginable speed. Our online world is littered with photographs of people who do not exist, articles that recommend books that have never been written before, videos of imaginary locations. Even if we learn to recognize the treacherous disorders of an A-generated image (too many fingers, the fearsome incorrectly oriented teeth, an Escher-like impossible quality for the structure of buildings, furniture, bodies), improve and overwhelm us. It is embarrassing to admit that it felt a rush of interest or joy in a video of a lamp-lit hill village in the rain, just to realize that it is nonsense, an empty imagination and worse: twee. In order to recognize that she has fell in love with a picture, a song or an essay that is untouched by a human mind, this means that it also feels less human and terrible, vulnerable human: stupid and naive.
In contrast to the emptiness of AI, human counterfeits seem to be quite influenced: the mischief of them, the ability and boldness of the endeavor. Even the art market occasionally agrees: The works of the productive counterfeit Tom Keating, which produced thousands of counterfeits in the 1950s, 60s and 1970s, have now also appeared alone, provided that counterfeits from Tom Keating also appeared. Perhaps it is no wonder that such counterfeits can move us that are designed in such a way that they do exactly that to be paintings of paintings and at the same time empty canvases that we project all the things we want to take care of and experience.
When I think about my conversation with the man in the pub years ago, I remember that it is something wonderful to have believed him. Perhaps it is beauty to embrace the lessons scheduled by counterfeits that what we bring to art is our human self: subjective, easily bamboozled, ready to be moved. The man who kept up on a winter evening by talking to a credible stranger a silly lying lies accidentally led me to something true.
• The original by Nell Stevens is published by Scripner (£ 16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy from GuardianBookshop.com. Delivery fees can apply.
