What Is Wrong with an Art Forgery?: An Anthropological Perspective

Abstract

Art forgeries, together with a variety of other objects that come within the scope of this article,' such as high-quality commercial reproductions and works by minor artists mistakenly attributed to major artists, present both philosophers and historians of art with a singular and seemingly intractable problem. And that is, if the qualities that are admired in works of art are among their directly perceptible properties, as both Western folk models and the dominant theories in the philosophy of art suggest, why should a work that was once thought to be a masterpiece be when it is found to be a forgery (or a fake, etc.)? By disvalued aesthetically I mean forgeries are removed from display in museums, they cease to be the subject of admiring critical discourse, and if put on the market they bring only a fraction of what they would if they had been by the persons (or from the periods) to whom they were formerly attributed.2 My interest in this topic does not derive directly from the philosophical or art-historical literature but from having done anthropological fieldwork in a society that takes a radically different approach to the cultural and aesthetic