Perspective: So Vermeer didn’t paint “Girl With a Flute.” Why think less of it?
Authenticating paintings is increasingly a scientific process, with scholarly judgment making the final call. But for centuries, authenticity has also been a matter of desire and suspicion, avarice and fraud, and vast amounts of honest confusion and uncertainty. In the 20th century, the Dutch painter Han van Meegeren created forgeries that he passed off as the work of Pieter de Hooch, Gerard ter Borch and Vermeer.
News accounts of “newly discovered” paintings — in an attic, the dusty backroom of an antique store or a rummage sale — delight us because of the basic element of desire that colors so much of how we respond to art. We want there to be more Vermeers, not just because it adds to the storehouse of artistic treasure but because it promises the possibility of understanding what remains enigmatic about the artist. Art can be described, analyzed and subjected to X-ray fluorescence imaging.
owns it. The more tightly authenticity is controlled, the more intensely we may engage with the work. When the thing defined by the German critic Walter Benjamin as an artwork’s “aura” seems to increase in intensity, the intensity of our own engagement may increase as well.It is curious that the process of authentication has become more rigorously scientific even as authenticity is an increasingly suspect or disdained category.
Authenticity remains powerfully contentious in the contemporary art world. Artists have questioned why the original should be more valued than a copy, why a work should be limited to the physical presence of an object rather than freely present and transmissible like an idea or a concept, and why art should function like currency or luxury objects, with its value determined as much by scarcity as quality.Conceptual art often eliminates any idea of an original work.
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