Revealing and Concealing Art Forgery: Object Lessons from (Un)Suspicious Art

From Spain to the UK, from Belgium to Indonesia, stories of fake paintings or sculptures in museums or on the art market have been in the news. Such scandals capture the imagination as contests of wit and strength between those involved in fooling – art forgers and their partners – and those involved in foiling – experts and authorities of various kinds. The artworks at the centre of such storms often become objects of public fascination because of what, at least for some time, they have been hiding in plain side. 

 

Seeing and knowing, evidence and expertise, valuation and appraisal – not infrequently played out with large sums and august reputations at stake: because of such dimensions, efforts at revealing and concealing art forgery provide a potentially rich topic for scholars in and beyond the field of Science and Technology Studies. In this talk, I examine what, theoretically, is of interest about art forgery for the traditions of actor-network theory (ANT), and what has been called post-ANT. These strands of scholarship are concerned with ways of doing empirical philosophy: generating insights in questions of philosophy and social theory through empirical investigations, often of a material-semiotic kind. Based on published accounts of art forgery and art authentication from a variety of genres (journalistic, autobiographical, scholarly) I critically evaluate three concepts from (post-)ANT for how they illuminate the question of agency in the deceptive and complex relationalities of art forgery: betrayal/treason, present-absences, and ontological choreography. In conclusion, I will set out an agenda for studying art forgery and related topics centered on what is held together and what is animated by (un)suspicious objects.

 

Catelijne Coopmans is a Research Fellow in the Department of Thematic Studies, Technology and Social Change (TEMAT), at Linköping University, Sweden. Her research interests include visual evidence, visual demonstrations, and dynamics of expertise and sense-making in areas such as medical diagnostics, business data visualization, and art authentication. She received her D.Phil. in Management Studies, with a specialization in Science and Technology Studies, from the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, in 2006. Among her publications are the co-edited volume Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited (MIT Press, 2014), and the co-authored paper ‘Eyeballing Expertise’, with Graham Button, which was given the Distinguished Paper Award by the American Sociological Association, Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis section in 2016. Catelijne is a Collaborating Editor at Social Studies of Science, and a member of the editorial board of the East Asian Science, Technology and Society (EASTS) Journal. A Dutch citizen, she recently returned to Europe after spending nearly ten years at the National University of Singapore, and now works part-time as an academic researcher and part-time in private practice as a life/career coach for academics.