﻿What if the Mona Lisa was fake?
First, let’s ask, how much is the Mona Lisa worth?
The estimations vary between one and 50 billion Euros.
Obviously, nobody knows and that’s because it’s somewhat arbitrary.
Now, let’s explore this question by showing you these two images. Imagine that this is the
original Mona Lisa, the most valuable painting in the world. This, is a perfect machine-made
reproduction of the Mona Lisa. Side by side, you couldn’t tell a difference. If anything,
the newer Mona Lisa is more durable, in better condition and, you guessed it, a lot cheaper.
You can probably buy this better Mona Lisa for 20$ online, yet,
people are ready to pay a whole trip to Paris just to see the original painting.
Now, considering the notoriety and the worth of this artwork,
who would be surprised if the Louvre came out one day and said that the exhibited Mona Lisa
is a stunt double and that the real one is safely stored in an undisclosed location?
Nobody would ever be able to notice because it’s a perfect copy and because, as per museum policy,
most people can’t see it for over 30 seconds, 3 meters away from it.
If it was leaked one day that the Louvre is exhibiting a fake Mona Lisa, what would it mean?
Would the experience of the visitors of the past decades be devalued? Could they sue the museum for
showing them a fake work after spending thousands of dollars to travel and see it? Would it actually
matter if they saw the perfect copy of it or the original if they couldn’t tell them apart anyway?
The amount of resources and experts needed to distinguish a real work from a fake one
is astonishing. Years of research by several highly trained professionals are sometimes
put into proving the authenticity of one single artwork. But if this amount
of scrutiny is needed to determine if a work is an original or a copy, then why does it matter?
If the painting looks like a Picasso, feels like a Picasso and gives you (and some experts) the same
feeling and understanding as when you see an original Picasso, then why does it matter if
it actually is a Picasso? If it’s not actually an original Picasso, it won’t be worth as much,
of course, but in terms of purely artistic value, why do we not care for fakes or reproductions?
Why doesn’t everybody have framed reproductions of masterpieces in their homes?
Even though a work looks genuine and you couldn’t tell it apart from its original,
if it’s not certified as an original, it has little to no artistic value,
let alone any market value. It’s a truly fascinating phenomena.
It’s really important to understand this phenomena because it can reveal a whole
lot about the way in which we see things. Why are you willing to stare at the original Starry
Night for more than 5 whole minutes, appreciating the colours, its composition, its subject-matter,
but, if you saw a perfect copy of it in a hallway, you’d ignore it. It’s colours, its composition
and its subject-matter, even though they’re the exact same, wouldn’t attract you anymore. Why?
To find an explanation to this phenomena, I want to take a look at John Berger’s Ways of Seeing.
Before we do that, I want to say that reproductions can still be valuable to
many people. Perhaps some of you at home own a reproduction of a painting after seeing it in
a museum, or maybe because you really enjoy that painting. But I’m willing to bet that,
even though you hang it up on your wall, you hold the original to a higher standard. I want
you to think, what makes you love that image so much; it can be its composition, its colours,
its story, its emotions, its ideas... Whatever it is, if you hold the original with higher esteem,
what is it that you love so much in the painting that isn’t there in the reproduction?
In my most recent Q&A video, I gave an anecdote demonstrating how Magritte,
one of my favourite artists, was pretty satisfied with the reproduction of
artworks, going as far as sometimes being completely uninterested in originals.
However, in most cases, and it feels very intuitive to do so, we prefer by far originals.
In this video, I want to explore why we prefer an original over a reproduction.
With all of that in mind, let’s look at what John Berger has to say about this.
In the first episode of an incredibly influential four part series titled
Ways of Seeing, which would later become a book, Berger looks at reproduction.
He mentions cameras, both in terms of photography and videography,
how they changed, not only the access to art, but the very way we see art.
Now, instead of going to see the images, the images come to us. The image,
as he says, belongs to no place, it is stripped from its context.
Berger then goes to the National Gallery to contemplate Leonardo’s the Virgin
on the Rocks, explaining that he’s expected to feel the authenticity
of the work. He then exposes the National Gallery’s catalogue entry for the work
and reveals that it’s mainly focused on proving its authenticity, arguing that
the authenticity of work had almost become the most important property of the painting.
He then turns his eye to another work by Leonardo and this is where he reveals his thesis:
(around 10min)
Berger presents this like a slap in the face. With the invention of the camera, original works of art
lost their uniqueness. Berger says that a false religiosity has replaced this uniqueness.
What does he mean by that?
Because of the camera, original works lost the very thing they were valuable for:
being the only means through which you could experience that work of art. The
original artwork was valuable because it was unique, not in its form, but in its content.
Before the camera, the only way of seeing a Botticelli was to find one and see it in person.
The value of the original work was in its content, in the image it presented.
Something was lost when the camera was invented. The uniqueness of original
works wasn’t in their image anymore, because those images were now accessible anywhere,
but the uniqueness of original works was now in the very property of being unique.
As Berger says in his book “Ways of Seeing” which expands on the subjects of his show:
“The meaning of the original work no longer lies in what it uniquely says
but in what it uniquely is. How is its unique existence evaluated and defined
in our present culture? It is defined as an object whose value depends upon its rarity.
This value is affirmed and gauged by the price it fetches on the market.”
That being said, art can’t really be priced, but how do you justify artworks fetching millions of
dollars? Berger says that we assume that the market price of a painting is a reflection of
its spiritual value. However, he continues, the spiritual value of an object can only be explained
through magic or religion and since our secular societies reject that,
artworks are enveloped in a mystery which no one can explain,
or what Berger would call “an atmosphere of entirely bogus religiosity”,
What Berger says is that we are made to believe that original works have
some kind of mystical power. This is the false mystery he’s talking about. But
why are we made to believe in this false mystery?
Why do we believe in the mystical power of original artworks? Here’s what Berger says:
“[The function of this bogus religiosity] is nostalgic. It is the final empty claim
for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture. If the image is no
longer unique and exclusive, the art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so.”
Reproduction democratizes images. The very thing we love about artworks, their images,
are now accessible to anyone. For anyone who holds hierarchical values,
this democracy could be seen as a degradation of art. Take a Van Gogh for example. If a
reproduction of it was to be hung in a peasant’s small house, how can one distinguish themselves
from them? By buying a limited copy or even an original. Same image, same meaning,
just not the same position on a social hierarchy they desperately want to preserve.
Berger goes on to explain how the Way we See images can be manipulated through various means,
very often to justify the authority of the ones presenting these images.
Then, Berger explains how original works of art can be appreciated
in a different way from their reproductions,
because he makes it very clear that he still believes in the relevance of original artworks.
“When the art of the past ceases to be viewed nostalgically, the works will cease to be holy
relics [...]. We are not saying original works of art are now useless. Original paintings are
silent and still in a sense that information never is. Even a reproduction hung on a wall
is not comparable in this respect for in the original the silence and stillness permeate the
actual material, the paint, in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures.
This has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and
one’s own act of looking at it. In this special sense all paintings are contemporary. Hence the
immediacy of their testimony. Their historical moment is literally there before our eyes.”
You clicked on this video which asked: “What if the Mona Lisa was fake?” and,
hopefully, I have given you less answers than I gave you questions. Questions about art,
images, paintings and their history. I hope this encouraged you to read Berger, to watch his show
and to look a bit more into art and its power. Berger wanted to democratize art,
wanted to redirect the power it gave from the few to the many. He saw, in the power of reproduction,
a great force to connect people with themselves and, especially, to connect people with history.
To answer the question of Why we prefer an original over a reproduction, Berger says that,
even though there are still reasons to prefer originals, we prefer them,
in large part, because we are conditioned into preferring them. Reproductions hold power and,
as long as we defer to originals as the holy grail of art, we are cheapening this power.
“What the modern means of reproduction have done is to destroy the authority of art
and to remove it - or, rather, to remove its images which they reproduce - from any
preserve. For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous,
insubstantial, available, valueless, free. [...] Yet very few people are aware of what has happened
because the means of reproduction are used nearly all the time to promote the illusion that nothing
has changed except that the masses, thanks to reproductions, can now begin to appreciate art as
the cultured minority once did. Understandably, the masses remain uninterested and sceptical.
If the new language of images were used differently, it would, through its use,
confer a new kind of power. Within it we could begin to define our experiences more precisely in
areas where words are inadequate. (Seeing comes before words.) Not only personal experience,
but also the essential historical experience of our relation to the past:
that is to say the experience of seeking to give meaning to our lives, of trying to understand the
history of which we can become the active agents. The art of the past no longer exists as it once
did. Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses
that language for what purpose. This touches upon questions of copyright for reproduction,
the ownership of art presses and publishers, the total policy of public art galleries and museums.
As usually presented, these are narrow professional matters.
One of the aims of this essay has been to show that what is really at stake
is much larger. A people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose
and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history. This is
why - and this is the only reason why - the entire art of the past has now become a political issue.”