Art Forgeries in Light of Neuroaesthetics

Art Fraud, a new eight-episode podcast hosted by Alec Baldwin, is a riveting chronicle of the art world's biggest scandal in recent years. In the words of Michael Shnayerson, who reported on the story for Vanity Fair, New York's highly respected, but now defunct Knoedler Gallery bought and sold "one dazzling knock-off after another."

Over the course of fourteen years, the Knoedler bought and sold forgeries of paintings by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, and Milton Avery--as well as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Whether or not the gallerists knew about the forgeries is a subject of intense debate.

By all accounts, the new owners of these paintings treasured them, until they discovered they were forgeries. On the art market, the paintings lost all monetary value. And, it seems, they lost all aesthetic value for many, if not most. What was once dazzling became embarrassing. The objects remained the same, but people's perceptions of them changed radically. This was inevitable in the current art market, but might there be still new ways to perceive these works? We may find some answers in the field of neuroaesthetics.

Neuroaesthetics is a relatively new field, blending philosophical traditions with contmemporary neuroscience to investigate "the neural bases for the perception, contemplation and creation of art" (van Leeuwen, et al.). What might have been going on in the brain's of people who admired the paintings in question, both before and after discovering they were forgeries? Van Leeuwen and colleagues argue that "art engages the social brain," recruiting "the same brain networks as complex social behavior." Because of this, no aesthetic response is universal. Instead, "it's highly dependent on the viewer’s personal knowledge and experiences and their social and cultural environment."

Walk in to the prestigious Knoedler Gallery, where you are greeted by experts in the vocabulary of contemporary art, and you have landed in a social situation primed to offer you a "dazzling" aesthetic experience.

Baldwin's chronicle, like Shnayerson's, focuses on the juicy details of the crime. But what of the artist, a man so talented he could paint forgeries by not one, but many high-profile artists--forgeries so convincing that discerning gallerists and collectors believed they were authentic? While the podcast includes extensive interviews with Anna Konnikova on the psychology of con artists and their victims, it doesn't explore the psychology of the aesthetic experiences at the heart of the con.

The artist is Pei-Shen Qian, a painter who studied at the Art Students League, whose enormous talent was recognized by his teachers and peers. By the late eighties, his career in New York had been languishing. Two con artists disovered Qian was selling paintings in Times Square "in the style of" masters like Monet and Matisse. His copies, or homages, sold for hundreds of dollars, not hundreds of thousands--not millions. He signed them with his own name.

As art historian Sharon Flescher observes in one episode, "The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls--they don't even know or suspect that they're fake." In fact, it required forensic analysis to determine that many of Qian's paintings used materials that hadn't existed when the original artists created their work.

When Anne Freedman, Director of the Knoedler, sought family members and experts to help authenticate the paintings, they routinely expressed their evaluations with terms like "soul," "character," "breath," and "feeling"--as reported in 'Art Fraud' and the film Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art (2020).

These authenticators sought to describe a singular aesthetic experience created by a master artist, impossible to duplicate--something like what the philosopher Walter Benjamin called a painting's "aura" in his classic essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Benjamin was convinced--and neuroeasthetics bears this out--that mass reproduction would destroy the aura of a work of art. Think of mass-produced posters of the Mona Lisa. Except, as it turns out, the duplication of the ineffable was possible, so long as viewers didn't realize the painting they admired was painted, or forged, by another artist.

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Pei-Shen Qian "in the style of Mark Rothko

Source: AP Photos

Neuroaesthetics seeks to explain the physiology that underlies what feels ineffable--the experience of a work of art's aura, or soul. British neurobiologist Semir Zeki, an expert on vision and color argues that arts "capacity to give multiple interpretations is not a separate faculty invented or used by the artist." Instead, aesthetic experience relies on "a general capacity of the brain to give several interpretations to instill meaning by applying several concepts, a capacity that is important for it in its role of acquiring knowledge. It is on this physiological basis that the prized ambiguity of art is built."

For Zeki, art's "prized ambiguity" draws on various brain capacities--for example, vision, depth, color, and emotion. Feeling of Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience, Gabrielle Starr pushes the idea further. Based on fMRI research, she concludes that "the arts mediate our knowledge of the world around us by directing attention, shaping perceptions, and creating dissonance or harmony where none had been before." A work of art changes us, in physiology and in feeling. It makes new neural connections between brain systems, and it enables to see and know what we could not previously. In Starr's view, "what aesthetics thus gives us is a restructuring of value."

This may be why radical departures from tradition are difficult for audiences to see--and feel. If you've learned to value a Rembrandt, it may be impossible to understand, or even see, a Monet. Once you've learned to experience Monet as harmony, Picasso or Pollock may feel like profound dissonance because your brain hasn't created the connections that enable you to value it. And if art engages the social brain, that might explain why these radical departures tend to stir up so much havoc.

The discovery that a painting is forged introduces dissonance where harmony had been. Of course, when it comes to monetary exchanges, fraud is fraud. In the Knoedler case, it was arguably the dealers who committed the fraud, not the painter (though the FBI may disagree). At the height of the scam, he made at most $7000, on paintings that sold for millions.

The podcast quotes a number of artists and art historians on the Chinese tradition of copying masterworks--as a form of training, but also homage. In this tradition, the exactitude of a copy is value. There's no fraud involved. The artist and audience are engaging in a consensual aesthetic experience. Of course, Western artists from Michelangelo to Jeff Koons have employed assistants--other artists--to help them realize their visions. Few would admire the Sistine Chapel and question its aura by quibbling about which brush strokes may or may not have been painted by the actual hand of Michelangelo.

Qian was charged with fraud, along with the dealers who devised the scam. Because he had already returned to China, he was never prosecuted. Should he be? At the request of the scam artists, he changed a single practice. Rather than signing paintings himself, he forged those of the artists he copied. Of that, he's guilty. But it took a team of social brains--dealers, gallerists, and collectors--to transform his paintings into million dollar commodities, just as it did for the artists he copied.

Should Qian's forged signatures overshadow his dazzling works of art? His paintings were not copies of paintings, but of the styles of other artists. Might there be a new way to value his works. Imagine, for example, that a major museum were to purchase the dozens of his paintings that collectors have consigned to basements and storage spaces. What if said museum mounted an exhibition of Qian's work, either on its own or alongside paintings by the artists who painted "in the style of"? Might such an exhibition catalyze what Gabrielle Starr calls "a restructuring of value"? Might it forge new neural connections in audiences? Might it catalyze new feelings? Enable new ways of thinking? New ideas? New traditions in art? Such an exhibition would surely offer a new social context for Qian's art--and thus a new set of aesthetic responses.

Of course, Qian did not originate the ideas that drove Rothko or Pollock to revolutionize the tradition of Western art. Nonetheless, those who bought work displayed it with pride. They invited friends and fellow connoisseurs into their houses to experience the aura of the "dazzling" treasures they'd purchased. Surely, those experiences were valuable--until they weren't.