I’ve come to somewhat of a radical position on art fakes. I don’t see what difference it makes from a purely objective point of view who painted a picture. If what the physical painting depicts is fine art when painted by Rubens, and the fake is visually identical, then the fake must be fine art as well. What does it matter who did the painting? If the unaided human eye can’t tell the difference between A and B versions, how is one’s experience of viewing the paintings any different? What’s different is something external to the paintings: the painter. If it’s important to know who the painter was, it’s important not because of what’s in the painting, but because of some incidental fact about its creation. 

Apparently, the million-dollar price tags on certain highly sought-after paintings are not entirely, or even primarily, due to the aesthetic value of the image, but due to who painted them. It’s sort of like collecting baseball cards. The cards are not valuable in themselves, but because of whom they represent. Of course, the relative rarity of a given card also contributes to its value. But it’s not the rarity of a Van Gogh that determines its value. Every Van Gogh is unique; that is to say, equally rare.

For those of you with high-quality printed reproductions of famous paintings, take heart! Your aesthetic experience viewing them is not appreciably different than viewing the original. Unless you are primarily interested in simply collecting objects created by a certain painter. Actually, that very phenomenon seems to be what’s at play in the recent auctions of “digital objects,” or “non-fungible tokens.” Millions of copies can be made of a digital object, all of them precisely identical down to the zeroes and ones in the computer code that created them. What sets the digital object or NFT apart is the record of its ownership on the blockchain, a kind of cyberworld ledger that can’t be hacked.

Reminds me of the artist who was paid $84,000 dollars to create art for a Danish museum. In the fall of 2021 he delivered a blank canvas entitled “Take the Money and Run.”