Authenticity in Painting: Remarks on Michael Fried’s Art History

Abstract

My topic is authenticity in or perhaps as painting, not the authenticity of paintings; I know next to nothing about the problem of verifying claims of authorship. I am interested in another kind of genuineness and fraudulence, the kind at issue when we say of a person that he or she is false, not genuine, inauthentic, lacks integrity, and, especially when we say he or she is playing to the crowd, playing for effect, or is a poseur. These are not quite moral distinctions (no one has a duty to be authentic), but they are robustly normative appraisals, applicable even when such falseness is not a case of straight hypocrisy but of lack of self-knowledge or of self-deceit. (A person can be quite sincere and not realize the extent of her submission to the other’s expectations and demands.) This sort of appraisal also has a long history in post-Rousseauist reflections on the dangers of uniquelymodern forms of social dependence, and they are prominent worries in themodern novel. Why talk about paintings in such terms? The Western art tradition has been in a famous conundrum about the status of artworks—thedissolution of the borders between art and nonart, and the possibility of great art—for some time now, but it has rarely seemed to any discussant in that tradition that the normative issues at stake in a possibly modern art are like the questions sketched above about authenticity in a life. But it began to seem that way to Denis Diderot, a dimension of his work rescued, developed, and transformed with great elegance and persuasiveness by Michael Fried. In