Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

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99% of what you wrote was about art dealers and the art market. I really struggle to see what bearing any of that has on your central claim that "forgers are the greatest artists of all".

As an artist myself I find that claim almost insulting. A forger might have great technique, but in as far as he copies art rather than creates it from scratch himself, he's just acting as a sophisticated xerox machine or camera. I really don't see what lifts that sort of mechanical act even to the status of art, much less a greater art than that of the artist who created the original.

Also, to suggest that the marketing by art dealers or art's reception by consumers has any bearing on the "greatness" of the art they're buying and selling is less than convincing. Sure, there is more and less popular art, and art that rich people (many of them mere speculators) are willing to pay a lot for (often simply because they calculate they'll make a profit when they sell). But what on earth does that have to do with how great the art is?

If Van Gogh's art had remained as obscure and unappreciated as on the day he died (having only sold a single painting in his life, and that to his brother), would his art have been any less great?

It seems ridiculous to me to claim that the vagaries of the art market determine how great an work of art is.

To me art dealers and other middle-men are parasites and signs of inefficiency and friction in connecting consumers directly to producers (artists), and a necessary evil because so many artists hate business and want to focus on their art. That critics and dealers play a role in determining how popular art gets is symptomatic of the art world's pathology, not something to be praised.

It's arguably much harder to create a copy of a painting that can pass as a master than it is to create a new painting. It's a bit like the difference between a bad pianist playing his own songs and a concert pianist playing something he didn't compose but knows so well he can no longer play it wrong.

There is enormous skill involved in the latter, and yet you could easily belittle concert pianists as 'nothing more than biological player pianos' by your analogy.

It takes a lot of technical skill at copying, yes. But that's not enough for a number of reasons.

First, that's not the same as the skill in creating the artwork to begin with. For example, an artist make create an original painting from a live model or from his imagination. The copier may have no such ability, or may have a very weak ability at doing that. They might be great at taking an artwork that's already made and copying it, though. Pretty different skills.

Then there's the choice of subject matter, the composition, what of him/herself the artists brings to the art, the artist's own style (not the style of some other artist he/she is copying) are all things that a pure copier does not have and can not bring to the creation of the copy with it ceasing to be a faithful copy.

Now, if the forger is, like the subject of the article in question, creating some of his own works in the style of another artist, without outright copying their work, then they are being more of an artist in their own right rather than just a copying machine. But they're still far removed from making their own art -- something the forger in the article was all too well aware of.

"I view my life as a failure. I went the wrong way. I could have done something useful. If I could have my time again, I’d like to be a teacher at an art college."

"The problem is that I can’t find my own style," he says. "Whenever I think of an idea for a piece, I know who it’s copying. I always see something of someone else in everything I do. I don’t have an original style."

Some non-artists might not be able to understand this distinction, but it's crystal clear to most artists.

That distinction is very familiar to me. Forgeries are pastiches. Leaving behind the business of painting, a lot of art these days -- performance, conceptual --would be equally difficult (or easy) to forge because it communicates a particular attitude or state of affairs, truthful or phony. Graphic designers ("commercial artists") or advertising art directors know that their business is communicating a particular desired state of affairs, regardless of whether it actually "obtains" as they say in philosophy.

If you accept that all the things we call art are very broadly and fundamentally concerned with that (making a convincing statement, not necessarily a likeness of reality) then it's really clear how a class of skilled imitators can exist who can't come up with the "opinions" themselves. Why anyone should care whether a particular work is a product of original thought or not is the big, dangerous issue that forgery raises.

The thesis is that forgery is an attack on the very thing you hate, the middlemen that create narratives around art.

It's an attack using art, an artistic statement of its own, against the use of art as a signifier. It's nicely recursive and ironic.

I thought it was an excellent comment, one of the best this year.

Forgery is reverse engineering, an art in itself.

I too, drew the same parallel :D

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