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Comment by brobdingnagians | Hacker News Reader

> “These were very beautiful – fake or not," Feld added. "Whoever did this is quite an accomplished artist — just not the artist he or she purported to be.”

I always find it interesting that some of these works are high value when everyone thinks that they are by a certain person, and worthless when they find out it is by someone else. This guy would probably never be known for anything, except that he sold some expensive paintings he made fraudulently. But he has talent in that particular area; but that sort of talent doesn't get you far.

You'd think paintings have an intrinsic value by themselves, but in art dealing, context & association is everything.

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Replicas do have intrinsic value. I have several replica paintings and none of them were cheap. I prefer hand painted artwork & craftsmanship over prints. The difference is, nobody is fooled into thinking these are authentic Picassos.

As someone else said, the original paintings are worth more because they are one touched by the master. That history is valuable to certain people. I am not one of those people, and many others share the same opinion, they appreciate the art only for its aesthetics.

Interestingly, replicas of famous works are often much more expensive than original works by the same no-name artist. I have lots of originals from art students that I picked up for <$20 or so.

You see the same behavior in other fields. An original Mustang GT350 is worth a hell of a lot more than a replica, even if the replica is better in many metrics, because a small group of wealthy people value the heritage and history much more than the tangible good.

Worth saying, there is a whole village in China making living on oil painting replicas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViHZ_OdCDBg

The comment to which you're replying isn't referring to replicas though, but rather original paintings fraudulently attributed to a famous artist:

> FBI agents have identified eight probable forged paintings, five of which were billed as previously unknown works of Ault, an American artist active through the 1940s. Two other paintings were purportedly created by Crawford, an artist active through the 1970s whose precisionist style was similar to that of Ault, according to the search warrant affidavit. The last painting was purportedly created by Abercrombie, a surrealist American artist active through the 1970s.

To use your analogy, it would be as if someone created a car using Ford Mustang styling cues, but that wasn't a replica of any Mustang that Ford ever made, and claimed that it was a Ford Mustang prototype found hidden in a garage.

I was merely pointing out that the artwork itself does has intrinsic value, irrespective of who made it and when. As the parent said,

>You'd think paintings have an intrinsic value by themselves,

If paintings didn't have intrinsic value, then there wouldn't be a market for replicas and prints of famous of pieces. Yet, there is a market for such.

Where do you find good replicas?

(There are a few paintings I would love to have nice replicas of on canvas, but I haven't yet tried any of the online replica factories for fear of poor quality)

Local artists generally.

We have a lot of street fairs with artists showing off their work, most are receptive to commissions and you can get an idea of capabilities by looking their work. Anymore, my favorite place is this antique store next to an art studio, the artist that owns the studio makes a lot of replicas (and original) to sell in the antique store.

Andy Warhol made a whole career questioning this assumption.

Photography and other forms of reproduction changed people’s view of art.

There are a LOT of talented painters in the world, with incredible skills. But there’s only one Picasso. Buying an original is owning a tangible piece of history — an object that he touched with his own hands, which maybe then went on to tour museums around the world (and maybe bears the freight stamps from those travels on the paintings backside).

Otherwise you can just frame a perfect reproduction or poster.

This gives the camera a little too much credit. A painting is really a three-dimensional object (texture, etc, can be critical). So a two-dimensional projection of that will by definition lose information.

Oh, but this is giving a painting too much credit. A sculpture, of course, is truly three-dimensional - a painting can hardly be called three-dimensional in comparison. And this gives the sculptor too much credit, since it's just a creation of a stationary, dead object. True art comes from real movement of bodies on the stage. But this isn't true art either, for it's ephemeral. Clearly, a movie would have the most encoded information, and is thus the most credible art. But this is laziness, for anyone can hit record, it must be the person who photographs, who chooses the exact moment to capture, rather than the person who says "capture everything" that can truly get at the essence of art. /s

It's definitely more subtle than that, for sure. Rembrandt is a great example. He created life-like illusions through a mastery of the medium – the way light reflects and refracts through different pigments, the role of varnishing, the thickness of paint, etc. Standing in front of one is an entirely different experience than looking at a photo reproduction. Doesn't compare.

But broadly speaking, photography emerged at a time where the aim of most painters was still to create a window into a world. It's no accident that Impressionism emerged at the same time as the avant guard reaction to that. Which then led to abstract expressionism, etc – the idea that a painting is an object in and of itself. That the surface of the painting (the texture, the geometry of the composition) is what's interesting; rather than it being a vehicle for depicting some image.

Not just paintings but any art really. You could likely expand that to anything creative.

Someone could make a frame by frame reproduction of a Kubrick film, or cover a Bowie song as faithfully to the original as possible. There is some value in the execution, the talent needed to pull it off. There's so much more value in the idea, the situation that led to its development, the blood, sweat and tears.

It just so happens that in fine art there is scarcity and that drives the price up.

Not just art. For example, hundred dollar bills.

The difference here is that these paintings were "previously unknown paintings by well-known artists", so, it's not like a frame-by-frame reproduction or a cover song at all. It's more like a newly discovered but fraudulent Bowie album.

Anything, really, not necesarrily even creative. Imagine I gave your a piece of paper with my signature. How much would you get for it on ebay? No imagine, if on that piece of paper were signature of say, Stephen Hawking from 1960-ies instead. The amount of creativity would be the same, the price…

I suspect that you have objects of sentimental value as well. Most people do. Perhaps it is a book given by a friend that you don't throw away, even though you never read it and, if you had to, could replace it for a few dollars. Perhaps it's an autograph from a celebrity, or a prop from a movie.

Sentimental value isn't rational, but it's innately human, and practically all people practice it. The art market in particular is famous for expanding it to some ludicrous levels, where sentiment is given a dollar value in the seven and eight figures, but it's mostly just rich people playing on exactly the same emotions you have, with more money.

It's complicated by additional factors of competitive culture and possibly some money laundering, but at the base of it is a feeling that a piece of art that "witnessed" history takes on a value beyond the visual conveyed on the canvas. Often, the artist was innovative in some way that's appreciated by fans, and that innovation is no less rational than a baseball that was hit out of the park at an important time -- even though it's just a baseball.

I'm under the impression that sentiment plays very little role in bidding up art. Its a 'tulip bulb' sort of thing, where folks are trading the art essentially as they trade baseball cards, not because of intrinsic value (just a bit of paper or cloth etc) but because others may be expected to bid more later.

What is intrinsic value?

You can look that up. It means something like, the materials or useful value (as a tool etc) gives it a price in the market.

I'm sure the parent knows the meaning of the word, but was asking as more of a philosophical exercise. But funny enough, your example is still describing extrinsic value. Tools don't have intrinsic value. They're valuable because of a problem they solve. If they stop solving that problem or the problem no longer exists, the same thing happens to their value.

You've lost me. I was aware of both those definitions, and used them as I intended, I believe? Oh, its the tool issue. Its reasonable to value a tool for its inherent usefulness - that's intrinsic to the tool. Extrinsic value is just the market value. That one seems clearer.

Anyway I imagine the intrinsic value of a piece of art is, the joy it gives in interacting with it. Kind of the entire point of art after all. And notice, nothing in that about "who made it".

But it can give you joy to know who made a painting and the historical context of it.

They were also making things like fake memorabilia. For say a baseball bat with a Babe Ruth signature it is pretty obviously the authenticity of the signature which makes it worth something, not the "intrinsic value" of a bat with some ink on.

There is this attitude that it is somehow wrong to value authenticity when it comes to art, but I don't really get it. Surely an authentic historical artifact is more interesting than a fake.

Another view could hold that, in exposing a fake, one is deliberately destroying the value of an artifact. The 'real criminal' is the one doing the exposing. Until then, everybody was happy and the artifact had 'real' value.

Just like how your partner isn't cheating on you if you never find out? Seems like a silly view.

Come on. There have been paintings for 100's of years considered by a master, and later study disproves it. Were they valuable all that while? Sure they were.

You mean, did the thing they were assumed to be have value all that time? Yes. But then it was discovered that they were not that thing.

Does 'value' mean what people would pay for the thing? They paid lots for those 'fake' paintings. Ergo, they had value. The value was destroyed by looking a little too carefully at their provenance.

I simply observe that the value was destroyed not by the artist that created them, but by the investigator. That much seems obvious.

But whom to blame? That's a human moral issue. I suggest we could reasonably blame the investigator.

You are basically rejecting the idea that something can be fake.

If I faked a letter from Albert Einstein where he confessed to secretly being a Christian I'm sure people consider it of great value. Would it "destroy value" if someone figured out it was actually a hoax?

i wasn’t going to hell until i was told about the whole “God” fiasco

Or so you thought at the time.

It's true in most luxury goods. In this case, instead of Louis Vuitton, George Ault was the brand being replicated. High-end mechanical watches are another example, where the "right" name on the dial definitely affects the demand, even if lower-priced watches have nicer internals and finishing for far less cost. In fact, there is a whole group of consumers who knowingly purchase replicated pieces (some of which are getting indistinguishable from the real thing). A lot is in a name, in art and otherwise.

That quote came from a person who bought the fake paintings, so take it with a grain of salt. It sounds like they're deflecting questions about their credentials to sell art.

Reminds me of this:

https://archive.org/details/related_communists/page/36/mode/...

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