Analysing the role of authenticity in the art market

Thierry Lenain’s Art Forgery: The History of a Modern Obsession is, to my knowledge, the first book-length investigation into philosophical issues of art forgery since Denis Dutton’s 1983 edited volume, The Forger’s Art. And Lenain’s text, it must be said, presents in fascinating detail, not only historical accounts of forgery and its cousins—from ancient Rome up to the dubiously celebrated twentieth-century forgers—but also the history of religious relic veneration, which he argues forms the historical basis to today’s obsession over art authenticity. In his text, Lenain argues for three central points: (1) that art forgery, as we know it, did not exist as a practice in the ancient world; (2) that art forgery instead evolves out of medieval relic fetishism; and (3) that the perfect fake decentres the conceptual notion at the heart of contemporary art connoisseurship—the ‘trace paradigm’.
Lenain’s first chapter sets up the conceptual groundwork for what follows. Today, when a work is discovered to be a forgery, it is usually hidden away from view, or else destroyed outright. Art forgery is typically seen as a blight on the art historical landscape—a disease, Lenain suggests, that threatens the very notion of art. Art history and connoisseurship, he argues, have for quite some time rested upon what he calls the trace paradigm, the view that any artwork displays traces of its historical origin. In particular, the trace paradigm holds that the style in which a work is created invariably embodies its creator’s personality. Art forgery is something of an artistic changeling, then, devoid of value of its own and meant to usurp the place of real art. Once discovered, the forgery is seen for what it is: a monstrous doppelgänger. A true work of art forgery, Lenain suggests, imitates the appearance of an artwork with a different origin in order to steal its place in the system of art, and is susceptible to harming someone’s interests. Forgery, as such, plays a unique role