Identifying a Forgery

Question
How can you identify a forgery in art?  

      People can master copying and replicating pieces. You may have brought a bag you thought was a Coach but turns out it wasn't. One concept to focus on is the quality and the artists' style. There is typically something unique in an original piece, even if it's the signature of the artist. This is why Dutton says that we must have knowledge of a piece before judging it aesthetically. As far as we know, we could be looking at a Vermeer when it’s actually a Van Meegeren. With Andy Warhol's Brillo box, the signature, if it has one, may be the only thing that we can use to distinguish it from a machine produced Brillo boxes because he made his Brill box identical to the machine produced one.  If one were to copy Andy Warhol and make a Brillo box, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the Andy Warhol’s Brillo box and another random artist's Brillo box yet there is an extreme difference between the values of the two. People will pay millions for Andy Warhol's work but little to nothing for the work of a random artist copying the style of Andy Warhol or a machine produced Brillo box without any soap pads in it. In the end, knowledge can help you identify a forgery. 

A Forgery Can Help

Question

           How can a forgery be helpful? Who would a forgery help?

                 A forgery can help put people in the public eye. This happens in cases like Van Meegeren’s scandal in which he passed off one of his pieces as a Vermeer. However, it revealed how the critics were focused on fame. They claimed the work of Van Meegeren was great cause it was supposed to be a Vermeer but once they found out who  the true artist, they wanted to be done with the piece. Here, Van Meegeren helped himself and was the center of the public eye for the art world but also gave people the knowledge of the wrong ways of the critics and perhaps they should not trust them as much. 

               Another example is when a person's identity is forged by another person in order to protect them. This has been portrayed in the movie White Chicks when two male police officers go under cover as two sisters in order to capture the criminal and prevent them from being kidnapped or hurt. In addition, in the movie Star Wars, Princess Leah has one of her ladies dress as she would, being the princess and she dresses in normal clothing as her ladies would. In this way, if someone were to attack her, or what they thought was her, she would be safe.  

               Furthermore, I can also see a forgery helping museums protect very sensitive and fragile art pieces or documents. For example, they may display an art piece that looks exactly like the original but it is not so the work can be persevered and safe.

                In the end, it is morally wrong to pass off work as someone else’s when it’s yours, pretend to be someone else when you aren’t, and display forged art work, but if it’s done with good intentions like protection, then that has to be morally right.