My subject is forgery--its function and meaning in the context of artistic representation.

Literally defined, forgery is the shaping of metal through the application of high temperature, a process whose development marked a major stride in the progress of civilization. But in a second, more common meaning--and the one that concerns me here--forgery is a process of copying a valuable artifact so as to deceive a viewer into thinking that it is original or real. This sort of forgery, though a crime, is associated with a more advanced point in the progress of civilization.

Forgery of this second kind prompts us to ask practical questions: how was the thing done; how long did it remain undetected; how was it exposed? It also prompts conceptual questions: what does a forgery, which manages to fool us for a time, say about our ability to perceive and judge accurately; what, to extrapolate, does it mean to be accurate in perception and judgment; and finally, why does forgery matter in the history of art and in culture more generally?

Forgery has a kinship with magic. Both trick us through sleight of hand and call into doubt what is real. Both capture our attention and fascination. One way to get a work looked at closely is to suspect it of being a forgery.

Beginning in the late 1960s, a group of art experts calling themselves the Rembrandt Research Project began reviewing hundreds of works attributed to the great seventeenth-century Dutch painter. In the course of their study the experts concluded that at least half of the works believed to be by Rembrandt were forgeries, copies, or misattributions. This was a startling revelation. It was as if the art in question had suddenly disappeared off the walls of museums and private collections and been magically replaced by different works. The substitution, moreover, was not one-way. As research progressed, some art that was initially presumed to be fraudulent was reinstated- as if the magic wand had been waved again, putting these works back where they had been.

In magic, of course, the effect is connected to hiding the mechanism of transformation, while forgery, to have an effect, requires revealing that mechanism. If we don't learn through scientific analysis, connoisseurship, or the confession of the forger that the thing is fake, we continue to be fooled but not know that we are, which thereby precludes the effect.

Part of the mystique of forgery is that it only pertains to certain kinds of artifacts. The philosopher Nelson Goodman has explained that representations can be delineated into two kinds: allographic (works that are based on a notation that exists outside the representation itself) and autographic (works that have no antecedent notation and exist as singularities)--and that only autographic works can be forged. Thus, one can forge a painting or sculpture, a signature, an original manuscript, or, for that matter, an identity (though once the human genome has been thoroughly mapped, this may change). One can not forge a novel, a piece of music, or a play, except insofar as one can forge an original manuscript of these things (the case of the famous Shakespeare forgeries in the eighteenth century). The preferred crime for allographic forms is plagiarism, in some sense the reverse of forgery: instead of passing off one's own work as the work of another, the plagiarist passes off the work of another as one's own. One can see why forgery is the more glamorous crime. The plagiarist is both self-aggrandizing and talent-less, while the forger is self-effacing (at least for the purposes of the crime) and must possess a modicum of talent (or at least of skill) in order to succeed.

Forgery can be further demarcated in its association with certain kinds of artifacts within the autographic realm. One speaks of forging rarities rather than more mundane objects, for which the preferred term is counterfeiting. The difference is that the counterfeiter makes fraudulent merchandise in mechanical, mass-produced form (jeans, handbags, currency), while the forger makes discreet, careful imitations and is most often associated with fine art. (Note that a forged check is really a forged signature, which is to say, a highly idiosyncratic, personalized representation.)

The forger also tends to take advantage of our nostalgia for work associated with a remote, artisanal past--art that exerts the singular "aura" that Walter Benjamin described as a function of capitalist values. One thinks of "gentleman forgers" with their scrupulous methods and special tools, working alone in private studios. The forger, in other words, looks a lot like the artist--a point I will return to.

In the following pages, I want to consider in more detail the paradoxes attached to forgery, to explore the ways in which this criminal activity can be understood in the context of our culture, and how its meaning might change in a culture different from our own.

Let us begin with a thought experiment:

A billionaire has recently decided to donate his art collection to a museum, but his attachment to one painting in the collection is so great that he wishes to have a copy made to keep in his home. He offers to pay $10 million to the artist who can render the best copy. Many artists enter the competition, and the billionaire chooses to purchase the painting by X, which he judges to be the best copy. At this point, another painter, Y, announces that he has perpetrated a hoax: his rejected copy is actually the original painting, while the one donated to the museum is a copy that was sold to the billionaire at an earlier date (details of this transaction need not concern us here). The billionaire has thus purchased a copy of a copy, and rejected the original .

How do we respond to this revelation?

Our first inclination in hearing this story is probably to blame the billionaire for his poor judgment. We might assume that he was swayed by the famous name affixed to his painting and played for a sucker by an unscrupulous art dealer or bogus expert. So long as we have no interest in the billionaire's estate, we are liable to be amused by his ordeal. We may even think that, given his presumed ignorance and gullibility (and the fact that he can afford to lose the money), he deserved to be duped.

The assumptions here derive from what we have been taught about the importance of training in discerning good art from bad. The practice of judging artistic quality dates back at least to Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists included a number of anecdotes regarding the nature and provenance of certain well-known works (including a discussion of a Michelangelo sculpture, now lost, that the artist tried to pass off as a work of antiquity). Still, up through the end of the eighteenth century, cultural historians wrote only anecdotally on the subject of forgery and were not engaged in evaluating such acts in a professional, systematic way. This changed in the nineteenth century when the practice of connoisseurship--the professionalized act of judging the quality and authenticity of rare artifacts--came into being as an offshoot of the new field of art history.

Ironically, the first person to use the term in a professional context was himself a forger, one Louis Marcy, who is said to have flooded the antiquities market with falsified objects in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century London. After moving to Paris, he appears to have given up forgery and taken to exposing it, publishing a journal entitled Le Connaisseur to help in the process. Marcy's career path has become a familiar one in the modern era where con men retrofit themselves as gatekeepers or are recruited to catch other con men. The contemporary forger John Myatt followed a similar career path--and now does a brisk side business selling his copies of famous paintings on the Internet.

If Marcy was among the first to use the term connoisseur, Bernard Berenson was the first to give the vocation cultural prominence and respectability. The son of poor Russian-Jewish immigrants in Boston, Berenson earned a scholarship to Harvard where he began his study of art history in the 1880s. After graduation, he traveled throughout Europe, writing several well-regarded monographs on Italian Renaissance art and developing a network of contacts. Eventually, he became the expert consultant of wealthy Americans like Isabella Stewart Gardner in their purchase of European art, mostly Old Master paintings. Berenson's role, which continued into the 1920s (when his expertise was tarnished by a scandal involving the British art dealer Joseph Duveen), was to be a professional connoisseur: to determine whether a work was worth buying by identifying who painted it, how important the artist was in the tradition, and what the quality of the work was within the oeuvre of that artist.

By the middle of the twentieth century, connoisseurship had become an entrenched part of the art establishment and began to assume a wider influence as museums broadened their mission, seeking to appeal more directly to the general public. Thomas Hoving, the flamboyant director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1967 to 1977, was an exemplar of this more seemingly democratic attitude. While Berenson's clients were American nouveau fiche industrialists, Hoving's were the American populace who, though they could not afford to buy great art, could nonetheless pay to visit it. Connoisseurship became an important part of Hoving's marketing technique, and the concept of forgery became a dramatic means of making connoisseurship interesting to the public.

One gets a sense of Hoving's approach in a public seminar he delivered on the subject of forgery early in his career. In it, he compared authentic works in the museum's collection with forged or formerly misattributed ones: "Contrast the vigor of the good one, on the left, with the sickliness of the other," he instructed his audience. "Of course you can tell that the one on the left has a life and a light and a feeling to it, while the painting on the right is wooden, hesitant." Hoving's language here implies that, with a modicum of training, telling the difference between an authentic work and a fake one could be easy. In this context, those who don't "see" appear to be philistines or dunces.

However different their goals, Berenson and Hoving assumed that distinguishing the authentic from the fake was possible if one brought the right tools and qualities of discernment to bear. It is the legacy of this idea that underpins our sense, in reading the billionaire's story above, that he is a fool for having been duped, twice , with regard to his painting.

Still, it is possible to view the story differently. For even as Hoving put forward the notion that distinguishing an authentic work from a fake was not only possible but easy (if one knew how to look), such ideas were coming under siege from a spate of scholarship in the 1960s that addressed the problematic aspects of forgery. This scholarship was inspired at least in part by the famous case of Hart Van Meegeren, whose Vermeer forgeries so effectively deceived experts before and during World War II that collectors and museums purchased them at high prices. Van Meegeren's most notorious client was the culturally refined if morally degenerate Nazi second-in-command, Hermann Goering. This association, revealed after the war, resulted in Van Meegeren's trial as a collaborator.

The fact that Van Meegeren was able to pass off his forgeries to experts as authentic work of the highest quality puts the billionaire's case in a different light. We have up until now assumed his mistakes were the product of ignorance. But using the Van Meegeren case as a model, it is possible to see these mistakes as the result not of ignorance but of knowledge.

Let us postulate, for example, that the billionaire is not lacking in discernment at all but is a connoisseur in his own right, with years of experience and scholarship behind him, and that his valuation of the painting he purchased was based on what he knew about the artist in question. This was indeed the case in the mistaken view of the Van Meegeren forgeries. Abraham Bredius, one of the foremost Vermeer experts of the period, was led, through a series of circuitous associations, to see many of the elements that now strike us as flagrantly unsupportive of a Vermeer attribution as supportive of one. The very divergences became marks of confirmation. Here, for example, Bredius expounds on Van Meegeren's most ambitious forgery, The Supper at Emmaus : "The subject matter is nearly unique in his oeuvre, and it expresses a depth of sentiment such as one sees in none of his other works." Convinced that the work's deviation from existing works is a mark of its superiority, he concludes: "When this masterpiece was shown to me I had difficulty controlling my emotion ... Composition, expression, and color all unite to form a whole of the highest art, the highest beauty!"

An obvious difference between the billionaire's case and that of Van Meegeren is that the forged Vermeers were not exact copies of existing Vermeer works. The forger knew that because Vermeer had married into a Catholic family, Bredius and other scholars had postulated that he may have painted a series of "Catholic" paintings during an unexplained, seven-year lacuna in his career. Van Meegeren also incorporated references to a Dutch volk identity into these works, making them conform to the prevailing spirit of nationalism (these volk references had particular appeal to Goering).

Since no paintings of the sort Van Meegeren created in Vermeer's name actually existed in the Vermeer oeuvre, one could call the paintings forged originals (to distinguish them from forged copies of existing works). Remove the Vermeer attribution and they look less like Vermeer's known work and more like Van Meegeren's, who exhibited similar paintings in his own name earlier in his career.

To make my fictional scenario approximate the situation of the Van Meegeren forgeries, I would have to turn the three paintings in the story into a series of forgeries in the presumed name of another painter. The so-called original would simply be the first in this line of forged originals. I should note that Van Meegeren's own work gave rise to a similar situation. After he was exposed after World War II, he became so famous for his forgeries that they were themselves forged. Some of these were done by his own son, whom Van Meegeren had trained as a painter.

But let us return to my original scenario and reconsider the billionaire's case in yet a third light. Let us suppose that the original work, which one of the artists had copied and replaced, was not a forgery but a misattribution of another artist from the same period as the great artist to whom it was attributed. This original artist was little known, even unknown. What should occur now in valuing the work with respect to the two copies made of it? And to extend this postulate, what if the copy is an improvement on the mediocre original? Indeed, what if the copy of the mediocre original was painted by the master (perhaps early in his career as an apprentice to this lesser artist)? How does such a scenario compare with the one above in which the original painting is a forgery rather than a misattribution?

Such paradoxical situations, which occur more often than one might suppose in the art world, raise the question of comparative assessment, which stands at the root of ideas about the distinction between an authentic work and a copy put forward by Goodman in his 1968 essay. Goodman makes the point that if one is confronted with an original and a forgery that seems to duplicate it exactly, knowing that one is original and the other is forged informs the esthetic experience of looking at the two works together. Even if we can't see the difference between original and copy, knowing there is one makes us think that in time we can learn to see the difference.

This idea--that two apparently identical works encode the possibility of difference--assumes that the connoisseur, like the artist himself, has embarked on a journey to enlightenment. What the artist hopes eventually to achieve in the way of mastery, the viewer, as Goodman sees it, hopes to achieve in the way of "perceptual discrimination." As he explains: "what one can distinguish at any given moment by merely looking depends not only upon native visual acuity but upon practice and training."

Goodman does not address the idea of aesthetic value--the possibility that the copy might be better than the original and that training might lead us to appreciate, not the original, but the copy (what one might argue happened for the billionaire in the last version of my scenario). But this possibility finds refutation in the work of Goodman's contemporary, Alfred Lessing, who in his essay "What's Wrong with a Forgery?" argues that the original, even if undistinguishable from the copy--or even if superficially less good--is nonetheless better for the reason that it has "artistic integrity"; it is the authentic product of a particular cultural context that the copy is not. In a later variation on the same idea, Dennis Dutton calls the difference between original and copy the "performance" aspect of the work, which relates to how artists "solve problems, overcome obstacles, make do with available materials." Thus, even if one thinks the copy good or better, the original, by being the original, "performs" in a way that the copy does not. Taking this idea further, Sherri Irvin draws on T. S. Eliot's argument relating art to a historical tradition that it both fits into and alters:

Thus, to insert a forgery (that has not been exposed as a forgery) falsifies the historical record and throws the tradition into disarray.

And yet this conclusion does not entirely hold up. Our tendency is to think that we are dealing with a long time period here--that the work in question is a more contemporary work and that it is copying an Old Master. But, as noted, it could be an Old Master copying an Old Master, an Old Master copying a lesser artist early in his career, or a more contemporary artist copying a more contemporary work--all cases where the time between original and copy is much shorter, changing our sense of the importance of the historical element. Moreover, history (no matter how long or short the period in question) is both always present and to some degree relative in its importance. There is a historical component even in a forgery, and integrity, problem-solving, and performance are themselves relative things. A copy can have its own sort of integrity, encode its own problems, and perform in an admittedly unorthodox way. Van Meegeren's case, a subject of fascination to cultural historians, seems to be a striking instance in which the performance of the exposed forgery approaches the status of a conceptual artwork (a point to be discussed further below). In any case, one should remember that Goodman's own theory posits that a difference is always there, even when works look identical, which means that difference, no matter how small or seemingly negligible, may encode elements that are personal and historical with regard to the artist, even if the artist is copying another.

This raises the question of how originality--or, if you will, honesty with respect to origins--connects to creativity. Here it is helpful to consider what it means to be original--and how much difference is required for originality to happen.

The philosopher James Elkins addresses this question by noting that an original work is always to some degree the derivative of some earlier original, and he enumerates seven steps in the process of moving from one original to another. His schema serves not only as an abstract index for the relationship between continuity and change in art but also as a practical guide for the movement from student to master. In other words, each of the points he describes can be viewed both with regard to the artifacts themselves and to the developmental stages that artists follow in achieving mastery and becoming original in their own right.

The developmental evolution Elkins describes is from an original (or, as he puts it, an "originary" work), to a strict copy, to a reproduction, to an imitation, to a variation, to a version, and, finally, to a new original. This trajectory supports a traditional form of art education in which copying marks an apprenticeship in a student's development that leads eventually to a new personal style. Not all artists, of course, arrive at this desired end point--indeed, one could argue that most don't, which is why we have misattributions: works by artists who have been stalled in their developmental process at a point that makes it easy for them to be confused with more original masters. Still, the overall sense of Elkins's trajectory is toward an independent expressiveness, even if that end point is rarely achieved or if a given artist gets stuck at an early or intermediary step. This, I should note, was one of the defenses mounted on behalf of Van Meegeren--that his personal style was that of an earlier age (which could be equated with an earlier stage of artistic development), so that, unable to be acknowledged or to make a living in a contemporary context, he was obliged to pass his work off as that of the Old Masters who had inspired him. (This self- representation has been called into question, but it has persuasiveness in the context of Elkins's developmental trajectory.)

But the evolution that Elkins describes--moving incrementally from one original to another--is a theoretical one. Although, traditionally, artists were expected to apprentice to other artists--to work in their workshops, copy their work, and only gradually acquire their own style--this is a form of training that many Old Masters did not follow and that modern artists clearly deviate from (behind the familiar complaint that modern artists never learn how to draw). Moreover, avant garde artists often explicitly thumb their noses at tradition and claim to spring out of the void. (How much of this is posturing--itself a learned behavior that stands at the end of a developmental trajectory--is open to question, and may well complicate my point in provocative ways.)

Avant garde art seems the opposite of forged art, yet the two share a kinship in eschewing a traditional developmental trajectory. An example that in some sense encompasses both--idiosyncratic originality and exact copying--is Sherri Levine's photographs that use Walker Evans's original negatives to reduplicate his work under her name. Levine's photos are saying something original while technically occupying the intermediate developmental stage that Elkins calls "reproduction." (Indeed, one can argue that Levine's work is original insofar as it alters the nature of the representation from allographic to autographic in Goodman's terminology.) The point, Levine would no doubt argue, is that her copying is a transparent gesture--it doesn't hide the fact that she is using Evans's negatives--and in being so, can be placed at a later point in Elkins's trajectory (and change the work from an allographic to an autographic one). Copying that is not transparent--where the work is being put over on a credulous viewer--seems a different sort of thing entirely.

Elkins acknowledges this distinction in setting up his developmental trajectory, noting that forgery is "a perversion or failure of the normal process of increasing distance between student and master." But the statement also begs the question of what "a perversion or failure of the normal process" means. For one could say that all original art is a deviation (if not, more extravagantly, "a perversion or failure") of the "normal process" of learning about the world--that art is, by its definition, a duplicitous act insofar as it distorts reality even when it seems to render it accurately, which it by no means always intends to do.

This would seem to apply to Van Meegeren, who was able to turn his apparently mercenary decision to forge Vermeers into a kind of performance that involved both a poignant personal story about being misunderstood and frustrated as an artist, and a literal spectacle of "proving" that the painting he sold to Goering was a forgery by painting another in the same style. As a result, he entered the annals of art history as "the genial forger'--a figure who laid bare some of the misleading assumptions in the scholarship on Vermeer and some of the flagrant blind spots in the marketing of fine art more generally. This makes his work conceptually valuable, if not aesthetically so. (And again, the absence of esthetic value is open to question, given that his paintings were extravagantly praised for their beauty when they were thought to be authentic Vermeers.)

One may say that in forgery a legal crime is being committed and that this falls outside the bounds of what should be considered artistic. But again, the distinction between proper and improper transgression--of "boundaries" for artistic expression--is hard to prescribe. Artists are often the first to condemn bourgeois support of law and propriety in other contexts. Is the tendency to condemn forgery a kind of hypocrisy then--an action that artists castigate because it involves their own livelihood? Perhaps the context in which a forgery is presented may determine how we view the artifact or the process more generally. The finger-wagging in Hoving's lecture on the subject, for example--"Don't hesitate to use derogatory adjectives in describing forgeries. They should not be given any sort of adulation"--might, by its very smugness, incite artistic opposition.

When a forgery is finally revealed--and the longer or more complicated the process before revelation the more intense the effect of the "reveal"--it produces something of the same perceptual jolt that an original work of art creates when it is successful: It captures attention, it makes us look, and it makes us think by raising questions about originality and comparative value. By the same token, it also reasserts the sense of value that it has violated. The paradox of forgery is that it is at once transgressive and reactionary, artistic and highly conventional. The exposed forgery grabs us and excites us, but it also, in Goodman's view, trains us to see in "proper" esthetic fashion.

Elkins's statement that forgery is "a perversion or failure of the normal process of increasing distance between student and master" also strikes me as having broader implications. It suggests that in any process of artistic development, a perverse eruption may occur that can throw things off--not only mislead us as to where we are in the process, but call the process itself into question. For if the copy is taken for the original or even, as in the example of the billionaire's story, is able to supersede the original, what does this say about the validity of orderly learning? If, as Elkins notes, the "steps [moving from old original to new original] are historically determined categories and habits of thought," then what does it mean about our relationship to history and about our habits of thought when those categories are duplicitously (rather than transparently, as in the Levine photos using Walker's negatives) traduced?

To probe this more fully, it is worth moving outside of our own culture for insight. In his study of the Kwoma tribe in Papua New Guinea the anthropologist Ross Bowden notes that the very idea of copying is viewed in a different way than in the West. Kwoma art, used in spiritual ceremonies, is copied and replaced when it grows worn out or shabby. It is evaluated not as good or bad art but as correct or incorrect copying.

The disposability of the old art, once it has been replaced by a new copy, is hard for Westerners to understand, and Bowden notes that critics who castigate the purchase and display of this art in Western museums are confusing their own notions of value with those of the tribe, which has no problem selling what has become expendable. Not only is the original work less valuable than the copy for the Kwoma, but the further one gets from the original the more relevant and valuable the art becomes.

If we return to the anecdote about the billionaire collector, we might recast our understanding of the story in light of Bowden's description of the Kwoma. We can imagine the collector now as a wealthy member of the tribe, who has a wonderful ability to discern distinctions and is intent on choosing the most correct and latest copy of the original work, no longer in circulation and no longer of particular value. His home is the temple where the copy will be installed. The museum is the repository for the artifacts that no longer hold value for the tribe but are hung with its predecessors to satisfy the gaze of Western observers with their interest in the obsolete earlier versions of this art.

We might at this point seek to compare Kwoma art with Western art during the medieval period since here, too, religion dictated artistic production. The Virgin and Child, for example, was a common subject, associated with conventional poses and coloration. Still, this art did not involve literal copying and, anonymous and prescribed though it was in many ways, it also opened the way for change. One of the hallmarks of Western art history is that it seems to involve a coherent evolution--moving us from the more flatly stylized figures of the Middle Ages into the distinctive, but still realistic art of the Renaissance on through such movements as mannerism, impressionism, and, eventually, abstraction and conceptual art. In other words, art in Western culture seems predicated on an evolutionary idea, the seeds of the present found in the past but working a continual change on that past. No such evolutionary distinctiveness is to be seen in Kwoma art that simply continues the process of copying into the present and, presumably, the future.

And yet, if we dig deeper we can see that Kwoma art and Western art provide a schematic contrast to each other that makes them useful in revealing the underlying relationship of art to civilization. For while the two forms might seem to have different purposes and values-one religious, the other personal and esthetic; one repetitive, the other changing--they both involve an orderly relationship to time. In the case of Western art, this relationship takes the form of an evolving sense of art history that is a phylogenetic version of the evolution that Elkins associates with the individual artist in moving from copying to independent mastery. In the case of the Kwoma, the temporal relationship takes the form of a sustained repetition in the service of a larger idea--the art existing not as a singular step in an evolutionary development but as a correct carrying forward of what came before. Both, though predicated on different values, tie the past to the present and the future. This sense of continuity, abstracted, so to speak, into the realm of representation, is a necessary foundation to culture. It is the basic substrate upon which meaning can be erected and elaborated. It is not, in short, the artistic tradition that is at issue here--or at least not only that tradition--but the system of the culture of which its relationship toward art is the code.

This view of art provides a final insight into the issue of forgery. In Western culture, forgery is the criminal form that violates the system: it involves substituting a copy for an original work. In Kwoma culture, originery , to coin a term parallel in structure to forgery, would be the criminal violation: it would involve substituting an original (or at least a more original ) work for a later copy. Both violations involve continuity, though the balance of variables in each case is different. The esthetic values, in other words, are relative to their respective cultures, but the core values that underlie them are not: they constitute the structural continuity on which the self and its related meanings are built.