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posted by mrpg on Monday April 30 2018, @12:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the punters-were-happy dept.

A state-owned French art museum has discovered that more than half of its collection consists of worthless fakes and experts fear that other public galleries may also be stuffed with forgeries.

An art historian raised the alarm after noticing that paintings attributed to Etienne Terrus showed buildings that were only constructed after the artist's death in 1922. Experts confirmed that 82 of the 140 works displayed at the Terrus museum in Elne, the artist's birthplace in southern France, were fakes.

Many of the forged oil paintings, watercolours and drawings were bought with £140,000 of municipal funds over the past few decades. Others were given to the museum by two local groups that raised money to buy them by appealing for donations. Some were bequeathed by a private collector.

Yves Barniol, the mayor of Elne, near the Spanish border, said: "It's a catastrophe. I put myself in the place of all the people who came to visit the museum, who saw fake works of art, who paid an entrance fee. It's intolerable and I hope we find those responsible."

[...] Art experts estimate that at least 20 per cent of paintings owned by major museums across the world may not be the work of the purported artists.


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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday April 30 2018, @07:29PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday April 30 2018, @07:29PM (#673877) Journal

    Why is a signature that valuable?

    It depends on what you're looking for in this museum. If you're just looking for "pure" aesthetic enjoyment at viewing paintings, then the signature shouldn't matter. But that's only part of why people go to art museums.

    In an era when it's trivial to make copies and reproductions of a lot of types of art, there's been a focus on the idea of an "original," about "authenticity." Another word that gets thrown around by cultural critics is that original works have an "aura."

    By the word, they don't mean anything mystical -- just that our aesthetic experience is often influenced by a lot of intangible factors. Knowing that something is "important" to others and/or has historical significance is one of them. This isn't really about art -- it could be true of other random historical items. For example, many people report a cool experience by wandering the Roman Forum and realizing the paving stones they are walking on are the same paving stones that Cicero or Caesar walked on. It's not about "art" -- it's about knowing these are an authentic connection to the past. It's the reason people seek celebrity autographs or books signed by authors too. There's a kind of value in a personal connection to something which influences our taste. And I think that has grown significantly in the past century as it has become trivial to reproduce a lot of art... or even other random items. There's now a sort of fetishization of "original" things that have a personal connection to someone. If you go to the house of John Adams (just to choose a random historical figure, but pick someone else you admire), and you're told this is his original bed, his original furniture, some people find that an interesting experience. It wouldn't be the same if you replaced it with some random 18th-century bed just to make a "reconstruction" of what the house probably looked like.

    Another example: in the 1930s a bunch of Isaac Newton's papers went up for auction. Mostly wacko stuff having to do with alchemy and stuff we'd now think of "mystical" or "magical" as well as religious stuff. It basically sold for nothing, because who would care about that rubbish? If it wasn't critical to Newton's scientific theories, nobody cared. Now if you have a single page in Newton's own hand, it's worth a lot of money -- regardless of the content. We seek out "authenticity" in an age when it's so easy to just have reproductions or "fakes."

    So, it's not that the signature itself is that critical here -- it's the assumptions that go with it and the historical meaning it conveys. Some people may not just go to this museum to have an aesthetic experience of art, but also out of interest in this particular individual artist. Those people will likely be disappointed to know of "fakes."

    Of course, the problem is that many modern art critics and wealthy folks have started to confuse "aesthetics" and "authenticity" and to equate the two. Which leads to huge inflated prices, regardless of the aesthetic merit. Someone else on this thread compared it to snobbishness about wine or fashion or whatever, and that's an apt comparison. Many studies have shown that the vast majority of people (even among "wine experts") often can't judge the SAME WINE consistently, let alone be able to consistently judge cheap from expensive or whatever. Some major wine competitions have been analyzed and shown that it seems like the random results might as well be pulled from a hat. And YET, there are studies that show that if you drink wine and are told it is "more expensive" or shown an "expensive" bottle (or that it's from France instead of Texas or whatever), people will enjoy it more. There has even been a brain study showing that the pleasure centers of your brain light up more when you drink the same wine as you did earlier but are told it is a different wine that is more expensive.

    That's part of what goes on in the art world. The aesthetic experience gets into this feedback loop with the idea of "authentic" or "expensive." And it wouldn't surprise me if people literally got more enjoyment out of viewing a painting that is a "fake" if they were told it was expensive by an "important" artist.

    During the renaissance it was common for students to do much of the work that would finally be completed by the master. Sometimes probably all he did was sign it. Was that a fake? If not, why not?

    No, it was not a fake. Because the standards of the day were different. Because of different expectations of historical artists. The 18th and 19th century German Romantics created this concept of an "artistic genius" that is now admired and infected the evaluation of cultural products. We now place more value on individual "artistic inspiration" than they did in the renaissance among guilds and craftsmen.

    If so, why is a signature that valuable?

    Blame the German enlightenment.

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