Forgery and Appropriation in Art Darren Hudson Hick* Texas Tech University Abstract Although art forgery is documented throughout the history of Western art, philosophical discus- sion of the problems of art forgery is a relatively recent matter, beginning largely in the latter half of the twentieth century. Arising even more recently is the practice of creating ‘appropriation art’, a topic that has so far been largely ignored in aesthetics but which raises some challenging ques- tions especially when compared with forgery. This article introduces some of the philosophical problems that arise from the practice and products of art forgery and in the contemporary move- ment of art appropriation. Rather than involving issues on the periphery of aesthetics, I suggest, forgery and appropriation art cut to the heart of issues in the ontology of art, the intersection of aesthetics and ethics, and other central areas in the philosophy of art. 1. Introduction It would be difficult to guess just how many of the works in the world’s major art muse- ums – the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum – are forgeries. It would be difficult to guess precisely because theyareforgeries. Being undetected or undetectable is their very point. When forgeries are discovered – or often, even suspected – they tend to be relegated to basement storage, or destroyed outright. But it is a fair bet that at least some of these museums unwittingly display forgeries. It is curious, then, that museums around the worldknowinglydisplay reproductions of some works not by their original artists, but by copyists. On the open market, such pieces can demand auction prices several orders of magnitude over the originals. Known as ‘appropriation art’, these works seem to have much in common with forgeries. So why do we knowingly display appropriation art and yet hide away or destroy forgeries? To understand whatisn’twrong with appropriation art requires understanding whatiswrong with forgeries, and understanding this requires first understanding something about the nature of forgery. There are two central categories of forgery. There are those cases of forgery in which some particular pre-existing work has been copied outright, and there are those in which some new item is attributed to some other artist, but which is not itself a copy of any pre-existing work. Jerrold Levinson calls those items in the former category ‘referential’ forgeries, and those in the latter category ‘inventive’ ones.1 Properly falling into the cate- gory of inventive forgeries, meanwhile, but in practice representing a middle-ground between the two, arepastiches– forgeries in which identifiable parts of several pre-exist- ing works are selected, reproduced, and combined together into a new item. Even in straightforward cases of inventive forgeries, however, there is usually copying taking place, though here it is typically an artist’sstylethat is copied, and not any particular pre-
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