Can a forgery be art? Thats something that I came out of this film wondering. Is the art or the artist more important? It seems, in the eyes of the collectors, that the value of the artwork comes from who drew it, rather than what the artwork says or is. When explaining the problem with a forgery, pure aesthetics cannot be considered. The mere existence of forgeries existing that have fooled art critics/experts reveals that the aesthetic value of the painting is not what brings the value of a forgery down. Any critic who holds the opinion that forgeries are somehow inferior pieces of aesthetic work are exposed to hold an absurd opinion every time a fake piece of art slips through critique and makes it into a collection or a museum or a gallery.
So if not the aesthetic value, what is so wrong about a forgery?
Last year, The Etienne Terrus museam in Southern France was discovered to have 60% of its collection as forgeries after an art historian was asked to rearrange the exhibits. That the many townsfolk and tourists alike were fooled by these forgeries was labelled a disaster by town officials and museum officials. But was the beauty, inspiration, awe and excitement that these paintings awakened in people somehow lesser because of the artist? I would imagine that, had those paintings been actually done by Terrus, the reaction to them would have been identical. Its certainly a talent, one that is trainable, to be able to paint in so many different styles so believably. Perhaps these forgeries are an artistic discipline in their own right. It just remains to be seen whether any of these forgeries will ever become famous enough to garner monetary value in their own right as fakes, rather than pretending to be painted by someone else.