The Perfect Copy

Suppose that a painting has been copied so exactly that no instrument and no expert can tell the copy from the original. If the value of a painting lies in what it looks like, the two should be worth the same, since looking at either offers the same experience. Yet the market treats the original as worth vastly more, and most people who learn that they have been admiring a forgery feel cheated, even when their enjoyment was real. Is that feeling merely snobbery?

One view says that it is. According to this view, the value of art lies entirely in the experience it provides. If the experiences are identical, a preference for the original is a fetish for authenticity, no more rational than preferring a signed banknote to an unsigned one of the same value. The preference may be explained by habit, by the pleasures of ownership, and by the prestige of owning the real thing, but none of these is a reason to think the original better as art.

This view overlooks the fact that the experiences are not in fact identical, because what we see in a work depends on what we know about it. A bold stroke in a painting is a decision, made at a particular moment, to solve a problem that this painter faced and that might have been solved otherwise. The same stroke in a forgery is the imitation of a decision. The forger solved no problem and took no risk; he reproduced the result of someone else’s solution. A viewer who knows this sees something different, even though the surfaces are indistinguishable. A work of art is partly an act, and we value the act as well as the object it leaves.

A critic may object that knowledge of this kind contaminates perception, and that a viewer who reports that a composition seemed daring and now seems merely correct has been influenced by prejudice and not by insight. But all perception of art is informed by knowledge. We cannot tell innovation from cliché without knowing what came before, or irony from sincerity without knowing the conventions. A viewer who knew nothing of a work’s origins would not see it more purely; he would see it less well. Knowledge of how and when a work came to be made is part of seeing it, not a distortion of it.

This argument has limits. It does not justify the prices that originals fetch, which reflect many things besides artistic value. Nor does it imply that copies are worthless: a copy made openly as a copy, as homage or as a means of teaching, may have a value of its own, because it is the record of a different act, openly acknowledged. The offense of the forgery lies in the deception, in the false claim that the act was someone else’s. What the argument does show is that the feeling of being cheated is not simply snobbery, but a response to a real difference between the thing one thought one was seeing and the thing one saw.