Wolfgang Beltracchi and the authenticity of forgery: Not a moral failure

Abstract

Reiner Schurmann’s Broken Hegemonies is a philosophical approach to how humans have historically created a rhetorical framework of ideas to operate in their existence. For this article, I will discuss Schurmann’s text, specifically his Hegemonic Fantasms of Nature and Modern Consciousness (as well as the associated concepts of the tragic condition and tragic denial) in order to understand Wolfgang Beltracchi as a skilled albeit complicated artist, researcher and art forger. Beltracchi operates within the Hegemonic Fantasm of Nature as the law (per Marcus Tullius Cicero and Marcus Aurelius) as well as with nature as the destitution of the hegemonic construct of nature (per Meister Eckhart) and the Hegemonic Fantasm of Modern Consciousness of the subject ‘self’ (per Luther and Kant), as well as the diremption of hegemonic concepts (per Martin Heidegger). I will further discuss Nature as the law of authenticity and provenance within the twentieth-century art market as discussed in Anthony Amore’s The Art of the Con, Arne Birkenstock’s documentary, Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery, as well as articles from Deutsche Welle (DW) and Times Magazine, and then define diremption as the self-reflexive gaze as discussed in Martin Heidegger’s essays from Basic Writings and Schurmann’s interpretation of Heidegger’s text, Contributions. While I am of the opinion that Beltracchi is operating under the particulars of laws and ‘ethics of naturality’ (via Roman Stoicism), he is also operating outside of Nature and into the narration of singularity that contradicts the Hegemonic Fantasm of Modern Consciousness. I will argue that Beltracchi utilizes the fantasm of the art market to operate within the fantasm of forgery and, in doing so, becomes an ‘obedient spirit that lets itself be broken’ and re-subsumed by art itself.