This paper introduces The Visual Ledger, a diagnostic analysis of European art history between 1849 and 1991 that treats painting as an archival instrument registering the progressive evacuation of ontological weight from the human figure. Using a diagnostic history methodology, the article argues that painters detected and documented shifts in how presence, consequence, and embodiment are organised decades before these transformations consolidated institutionally. Beginning with the material density of Realism in Courbet and Repin, the analysis traces a directional transformation through Impressionism’s optical dissolution, Pointillism’s cognitive fragmentation, Art Nouveau’s decorative masking, Malevich’s honest void, and Pop Art’s operationalisation of abstraction as governance. The AIDS crisis functions as a late twentieth-century visibility stress test, exposing the limits of surface-based legibility when confronted with suffering resistant to procedural categorisation. The paper demonstrates that visual archives independently converge with literary and administrative records, showing that populations currently collapsing under procedural abstraction are experiencing the settlement of a transformation painters registered when evacuation began. This contribution is conceptual and diagnostic rather than empirical. It forms one component of the broader Equilibrium Ledger framework, which examines how institutions generate and distribute cognitive costs, and how procedural abstraction renders embodied complexity administratively legible while humanly inaccessible.
This context informs the conversations with artists and creative practitioners in this book.Often, their work with and around Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) emerges from these very concerns.Does that mean that DAOs are capable of solving the sociopolitical issues of precarity, cuts, and censorship?No. 'Free blockchain money' does not exist.DAOs do not 'magically' make more funding appear, least of all structurally so.And DAOs do not allow artists and cultural practitioners to leave behind their national contexts of austerity and repression and exchange them for some virtual utopia.However, this does not mean that engaging with DAOs is pointless in the face of these circumstances and limitations.In this publication, I ask practitioners to share their experiences, focussing specifically on the definition of new forms of agency in cultural decision-making, explorations of shared ownership in arts and culture amid widespread logics of private property and extractivism, and the making of prefigurative claims on futures envisioned from the bottom up.None of these practices will be able to replace the structures of state funding or cancel oppressive concentrations of power any time soon, but they do open up space to manoeuvre and create tactical interventions, to find each other and build solidarity, and to regain a sense of futurity together.In other words, to reimagine, reclaim, and restructure shared socio-technical futures.The six people that I interviewed represent key voices in the countercultural and artistic DAO space.Penny Rafferty is a cofounder of Black Swan -a DAO that pursued horizontal and decentralised approaches to art-making -and she pushes DAO discourse into new directions with critical and imaginative work.Erik Bordeleau is a co-founder of The Sphere -a DAO that explores new ecologies of funding to develop a regenerative commons for the performing arts -and contributes boundarypushing philosophical and media theoretical perspectives to DAO thought.Ruth Catlow developed CultureStake -a voting system for decentralised cultural decision-making that uses quadratic voting on the blockchain -and has been a central Repression of Palestinian Culture and soidarity: Independence as Resistance,' Reset! 8
The coda considers the contemporary case of so-called NFTs or non-fungible tokens as a phenomenon in which many of the concerns addressed in this book meet. Returning to the art vandal Banksy, who made appearances earlier on in the book, and picking up the discussions about cult value and exhibition value in the work of Walter Benjamin from earlier chapters, the coda develops the notion of crypto value. Rather than introducing a post-exceptionalist politics, the coda argues that crypto value reinforces the fascistic tendencies of the value discourse in art and suggests that the future for a post-exceptionalist aesthetics and politics lies elsewhere.
This bachelor's thesis aims to interpret Damien Hirst's 2021 project "The Currency" in which 10,000 paintings were created, which were then converted into into NFTs (non- fungible tokens). When selling the works, it was the customer's crucial decision whether to buy the original or NFT version of the work, with the unselected variant being destroyed. The bachelor thesis will show that with this project Hirst has opened up the question of material-media essence and transformation of artwork, which can be researched as a problem of the theory of remediation, disappearance and aura, as developed by contemporary media science and philosophy, as well as the theory of reproduction in its relation to the original, as opened up by Walter Benjamin and developed with regard to his thinking by other authors of the 20th and 21st centuries. The bachelor's thesis, in addition to an introduction to the NFT issue, interprets its theoretical implications as a problem of the medium, its disappearance, and an issue of aura within art theory and history. Key words: Damien Hirst, The Currency, NFT, Remediation, Disappearing, Aura
La notorietà degli NFT (non-fungible tokens) sta vivendo nell’ultimo tempo una inflessione negativa, non solo tra il pubblico specializzato ma anche fra i meno esperti, che hanno sentito parlare di queste strane “opere d’arte digitali crittografate” nel 2020, quando questo fenomeno era nella sua fase di massima ascesa. L’applicazione di questa tecnologia, resa celebre dalla diffusione (questa sì, in evidente ripresa) delle criptovalute, al mondo dell’arte digitale e del mercato che intorno a questa si è generato, risente ora delle conseguenze di questa diffusa sfiducia verso l’“arte su blockchain”. Insomma, i celebri cripto-gattini non sembrano essersela mai passata così male come ora. È forse giunto dunque il momento di una valutazione del fenomeno NFT che guardi oltre ai sensazionalismi del mercato come anche alle repentine disillusioni. In questo, gli strumenti dell’Estetica ci sembrano i più adatti a uno scopo certo pretenzioso ma necessario, considerando soprattutto che gli NFT hanno generato, che lo si voglia riconoscere o meno, una piccola rivoluzione nel mercato dell’arte. Di questo parliamo nel nostro contributo “NFT: tra esperienza estetica e nuovi mercati dell’arte”, recentemente apparso sul volume della Milano University Press a cura di Allegra Canepa Il mercato dei non fungible tokens tra arte, moda e gamification. Il contributo raccoglie prospettive diverse – appunto estetiche, ma anche sociologiche, economiche, tecnologiche, etc. – sul mondo cripto.
The final chapter examines how the rapid expansion of technology from the second half of the twentieth century led to the rise of new techniques and categories of art, beginning with the use of film and video, and ending with internet and digital artworks, including those made by artificial intelligence (AI) and robots, interactive virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and works linked to non-fungible tokens (NFTs). However, a major problem is caused by the obsolescence of both hardware and software, meaning much new media art is inherently short-lived, and this, combined with their technical nature, makes their preservation an increasingly specialised field. The second part of this chapter looks at some of the strategies adopted by different organisations with regard to the complex issue of time-based media conservation, and discusses how international collaboration has led to a more unified approach and methodology.
Dijitalleşme süreci, her disiplinde kendi teknolojik dönüşümünü oluşturmaktadır. Sanatın dönüşüm sürecinde birtakım problemler ortaya çıkmış ve bu süreçte ortaya çıkan “Taklidi Mümkün Olmayan Jeton” Non-Fungible-Token (NFT) sanat alanında; eserlerin dijital olarak sertifikalanması, eser sahipliğini sunması ve satış sürecinin takibi vb. birçok ihtiyaca çözüm niteliği olarak görülmektedir. Nitekim NFT teknolojisi, sanattan bağımsız kullanımından kaynaklı, insanlarda kavram çatışmasına, sanatçılarda fikir ayrılıklarına sebep olurken aynı zamanda direnç unsurları oluşturmuştur. Teknolojik determinizm bakış açısıyla ele alınan bu çalışma, NFT teknolojisi özelinde aura ve direnç unsurlarını çözümlemektedir. Çalışma grubu, NFT tabanlı eser üreten sanatçılarla sınırlandırılmıştır. Sanatçılarının direnç ve auraya yönelik tutumlarına ilişkin veriler, çevrimiçi anket çalışması aracılığıyla toplanmış olup istatistiki analiz programıyla analiz edilmiştir. Veriler, araştırma grubuna uygulanan yarı-yapılandırılmış derinlemesine görüşmeler ile desteklenmiştir. Çalışmada nicel ve nitel araştırma yönteminin birlikte kullanıldığı karma araştırma yöntemi seçilmiştir. Karma yöntemin sınıflandırılması “Açıklayıcı”, düzeyi “Tamamen”, zaman yönelimi “Sıralı”, vurgu yaklaşımı “Eşit statüde” belirlenmiştir. Soruların kuramsal temeli Walter Benjamin’in “Sanatın Aurası” kavramından oluşturulurken çalışmada “NFT teknolojisiyle inşa edilen dijital sanatın aurası, sanatı toplumdan uzaklaştırmaktadır” hipotezi araştırılmıştır. Analizler sonucunda, sanatçılar tarafından NFT tabanlı eserlerde aura oluşumunun ve karşılaşılan direnç unsurlarından dolayı NFT teknolojisinden uzaklaşmama eğiliminin desteklendiği saptanmıştır. Çalışmada sanatın dönüşüm sürecinde ihtiyaca çözüm olarak görülen bir aracın, sanatı dönüştürüp dönüştürmediği, direnç ve sanatçı ilişkisi, gelecek ön görüleri tespit edilmiş olup “Siber Aura” kavramı ortaya atılmıştır. Veriler, sanatın teknolojik yeniliklerde aynı veya benzer sorunlar yaşamamasına, sanatçıların dijitalleşme sürecindeki sanata bakış açılarına dikkat çekme ve yeni kavramların literatüre eklenmesi amacı taşımaktadır.
On 8 September 2022, the American artist Frank Stella launched a series of twenty-two digital art works minted as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) in collaboration with Arsnl, the in-house platform by the Artist Rights Society (ARS). Titled Geometries, each “package,” included the NFT that would affirm ownership and the corresponding geometric model designed by Stella in JPG (image), MP4 (video), SLS (3D printing), GLB (virtual reality and model manipulation), and USDZ (augmented reality). This range of digital formats alludes to two of Stella’s innovations in this space: the license to remix and manipulate his models, and the ability to 3D print Geometries at any color, scale, and material. Taking Stella’s foray into the NFT-space as a starting point, my article focuses on an emergent trend by artists engaging with Web3: the effort to bridge the physical and the digital by giving tangible form to NFT artworks and what this suggests for the future of digital materiality. The paper at its core seeks to examine the relationship between the physical referents to NFTs at the very moment when new media returns to historical forms.
This chapter uses Benjamin’s understanding of nihilistic temporal structure of modernity as commodity and his theoretical readings of mass media to assess the ability of two online phenomena, memes and NFT (non-fungible token) art/crypto art, to resist platform nihilism and provide profane illuminations that are able to disrupt the progress of history seen as the eternal return. The chapter follows the understanding of platform nihilism as a contemporary situation of globalized digital social networks presented by Geert Lovink and Nolen Gertz, and the roots of this recognition found in Walter Benjamin’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s thoughts on nihilism, respectively. The focus on the phenomenon of crypto art and the meme culture demonstrates how these may be expressions as well as subversions of the platform nihilism online. Furthermore, using network culture research and opinions of digital art stakeholders, the chapter reveals that current nihilism is again part of a capitalist commodity structure. Thus Benjamin’s cautiously optimistic view of mass media’s revolutionary abilities and pessimistic views of fascist takeover of mass media of his time lend themselves to an assessment of the current moment in development of memes and NFT art. Again, Benjamin’s questioning of the socio-historical entanglement of media as conditions of possibility of change proves its relevance.
Abstract Modern and contemporary art have redefined the relationship between information and matter. Whether in the readymade's scrambling of the categories of art and commodity or Conceptual art's translation of matter into information, the artwork is embedded in a dynamic multi-media discourse. The NFT, or non-fungible-token, reverses this long genealogy of contemporary art by hijacking the category of art as nothing more than a tool for designing a new asset class, ripe for exuberant speculation. In short, the readymade—whose purpose was to demonstrate the fungibility of artworks when shifted from one discursive category to another—has been reversed.
Acclaimed critic Sianne Ngai theorizes the gimmick as an aesthetic category reflecting the fundamental laws of capitalism. Gimmicks make promises of saving labor and increasing value that we distrust but also find attractive. Exploring the use of this form, Ngai shows how its aesthetic dissatisfactions reflect deeper anxieties about capitalism
Clyfford Still on the Margins of Anarchy Allan Antliff (bio) Among the founding artists of the American Abstract Expressionist movement, Clyfford Still's pronounced individualism and hostility to State power are routinely acknowledged, but have yet to be critically evaluated in dialog with anarchist currents during and after World War II (fig. 1). David Anfam, who is the foremost authority on Still, has provided a baseline for charting interrelationships by perceptively analyzing how the artist's "Nietzschean brand of individualistic anarchism" shaped his self-conception and aesthetic romanticism, but goes no further.1 More generally, scholarly treatments of Still's art and politics have foregrounded the Cold War as the key issue, to the detriment of anarchism. Susan Landauer, for example, influentially characterized the artist as a reactionary right-winger during the 1990s (more recently acknowledging Still's politics were not right wing, she supports her case with a passing reference to anarchist poet Kenneth Rexroth's "later" [1959] critique of the "social lie" by way of comparison).2 Similarly, in Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (1999), David Craven marshaled Anfam's analysis only to conclude Still's anarchism drew him into an "unwitting convergence with [Cold War] laissez-faire individualism."3 Turning to Ellen D. Landau's codifying anthology, Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique (2005), Still is again subsumed into Abstract Expressionism's Cold War reception, with Marxist interpretations of the movement's aesthetics and social significance predominating.4 Katy Siegel, Lillian Davies, and Pauline Pobocha's exhaustive survey, Abstract Expressionism (2011) is similarly silent regarding anarchism as a factor in Still's development.5 The pattern is indicative of how Abstract Expressionism is broadly framed in the [End Page 491] discourse: as a breakthrough "American" style pioneered by leftist-inclined artists in response to World War II and buffeted, initially, by the politics of the Cold War, which was quickly taken up by the art market, canonized as the latest advance in international modernism ("a new art for a new world"), and integrated into museum collections in the United States and Europe.6 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Erna Bert Nelson, Studio Portrait of Clyfford Still, 1941. Photograph courtesy of the Clyfford Still Archive, Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, Colorado. Until very recently Still's archive and personal library were unavailable to researchers, and this undoubtedly also played its part in the interpretative lacuna I am drawing attention to. Letters and other documents in the Clyfford Still Museum archive allow an examination of transatlantic anarchism's concern with aesthetic values, art's capacity to serve as a site of social freedom, and the institutional forces arraigned against the movement. Both Still's art practice and views, and his reception in this milieu, matter [End Page 492] for understanding Still's contributions to the politicization of art. Anarchists engaged in cultural networking through "horizontal ties among diverse, autonomous elements" (for example, social centers, editorial groups, activist organizations, and informal friendship circles) coalescing around opposition to authoritarianism in all its forms.7 These fluid, affinity-charged networks generated diversity, which was regarded as a positive value, in accord with anarchism's overarching ambition to institute direct forms of democracy within a decentralized federated system of governance.8 Consequently, Still's aesthetic radicalism and combative stance toward art institutions found a willing audience among anarchists, even as he deliberately marginalized himself from broader social struggles. The American Sickness On November 25, 1957, anarchist poet/activist Michael McClure sent a letter to Still from San Francisco.9 He related, "I've admired your painting very much for a long time," adding, "I wish had gotten to the Bay area a few years sooner."10 McClure was recalling his decision to relocate to the city in 1951 to study with Still and fellow Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko (like Still, an anarchist).11 San Francisco is where Still had begun working in an abstract idiom, creating paintings that "established him as one of the most original and highly regarded artists associated with the earliest strains of Abstract Expressionism" (Sobel, "Why a Clyfford Still Museum?," 15). He taught at San Francisco's California School of Fine...
My thesis examines crypto art from several different vantage points. This is a budding artistic phenomenon which, can be broadly defined as art that takes place on the blockchain (also called a distributed digital ledger). Investigating this movement can aid in illuminating alternative forms of contemporary artistic practice, the direction of the blockchain, and a better understanding of cryptocurrency. Crypto art facilitates an efficient form of economic value creation for both artists and collectors, enabled by the blockchain’s capacities around tracing provenance and authenticity as well as implementing mechanisms to ensure artists receive compensation at the point of sale and resale. These outcomes would not have been possible in a pre-blockchain world. However, many of the approaches and philosophies are shared between the makers and functions of crypto art and conceptual art. Several aspects of blockchain technology are “new,” but the problems and questions that crypto art addresses, including its association with larger financial forces, have tremendous art historical precedent. Much of the modern art system is even built upon these connections, and paralleling this movement to conceptual art can help expose these affiliations. Looking at blockchain through the legacy of conceptual art also demonstrates the need for this technology and its capabilities, most notably, the built-in payment structure for artists. With this in mind, the central questions in my thesis are: how has crypto art challenged the relationship to authorship, ownership, dematerialization and distribution that were fundamental to conceptual art? And what relevance does this have for blockchain technology today? In attempting to address these questions, this paper will argue that crypto art reveals and critiques the framework of the art market. I will focus on Rare Pepes (2016-present) for my primary case study but will also survey other crypto art works to support my argument. The majority of my research engages directly with crypto art. For supplementary material, I have relied upon the work of Jason Bailey and Hito Steyerl as well as Oliver Roeder. I will also employ the writings of Lucy Lippard, Benjamin Buchloh and Joseph Kosuth to think through the theoretical side of conceptual art.
On February 25, 2011, the fashion luxury company Christian Dior suspended John Galliano, who had been its creative director since 1996, after his arrest over making anti-Semitic remarks at a Paris bar. Quickly following his suspension, a video from December 2010 was distributed showing Galliano hurling anti-Semitic invectives at several bar patrons. On March 1, 2011, Dior fired Galliano. At stake in the considerable interest and speculations regarding who takes over at Dior is control of a €24.6B business empire and access to a historic couturier’s archive. In this sense, its designer will influence the label’s "books" both financial and what will be stored in its physical repository as part of the brand’s creative and artistic repertoire. Despite fashion’s apparent ubiquity, the anticipation surrounding who takes over at Dior is proof that despite fashion’s professed democratization, there still exists a fashion hierarchy with Dior occupying its upper echelon. Since Galliano’s dismissal, fashion insiders have moved from breathlessly feverish in their speculations to desperately calling out for relief in the face of an unexpectedly drawn-out waiting game that is now over a year old and otherwise an eternity in fashion’s hyper accelerated production cycle. To purposely counter fashion’s accelerated internal clock, the purpose of this commentary is to keep fashion in a reflective state rather than a reflexive stance and uses fashion on film, and specifically Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter (1994), to give cultural and historical context to all the online speculation and chatter. Altman’s film is the fractal, or the repeating pattern, in a dramatized form, as well as the cultural archive against which to examine the entangled relations of the designer Marc J
Thierry Lenain’s Art Forgery: The History of a Modern Obsession is, to my knowledge, the first book-length investigation into philosophical issues of art forgery since Denis Dutton’s 1983 edited volume, The Forger’s Art. And Lenain’s text, it must be said, presents in fascinating detail, not only historical accounts of forgery and its cousins—from ancient Rome up to the dubiously celebrated twentieth-century forgers—but also the history of religious relic veneration, which he argues forms the historical basis to today’s obsession over art authenticity. In his text, Lenain argues for three central points: (1) that art forgery, as we know it, did not exist as a practice in the ancient world; (2) that art forgery instead evolves out of medieval relic fetishism; and (3) that the perfect fake decentres the conceptual notion at the heart of contemporary art connoisseurship—the ‘trace paradigm’. Lenain’s first chapter sets up the conceptual groundwork for what follows. Today, when a work is discovered to be a forgery, it is usually hidden away from view, or else destroyed outright. Art forgery is typically seen as a blight on the art historical landscape—a disease, Lenain suggests, that threatens the very notion of art. Art history and connoisseurship, he argues, have for quite some time rested upon what he calls the trace paradigm, the view that any artwork displays traces of its historical origin. In particular, the trace paradigm holds that the style in which a work is created invariably embodies its creator’s personality. Art forgery is something of an artistic changeling, then, devoid of value of its own and meant to usurp the place of real art. Once discovered, the forgery is seen for what it is: a monstrous doppelgänger. A true work of art forgery, Lenain suggests, imitates the appearance of an artwork with a different origin in order to steal its place in the system of art, and is susceptible to harming someone’s interests. Forgery, as such, plays a unique role in the artworld, a role not played by benign copies, harmless pastiches, or mere replicas. Lenain further distinguishes true forgeries from what he calls ‘artistic mystifications’, which, while identical in method with forgeries and intended initially to deceive, are also intended from the start to be ultimately revealed by their makers, and so not harmful. On this understanding, Lenain sets out in his second chapter to dissolve the pervasive notion that the practice of art forgery ‘is as old as mankind itself’—that it stretches back as far as the Roman Empire or earlier—what Lenain calls the ‘always-been’ fallacy. Certainly, the Roman period had no shortage of art copies and replicas, but, contrary to the claims of other scholars, Lenain argues that textual evidence from the period does not support a practice of art forgery as we understand it today. One such text often referred to by scholars comes from Phaedrus’ Aesopic Fables: As certain artists do in our day, who obtain a much greater price for their productions if they inscribe the name of Praxiteles on their scraped marbles, Myron on their polished silver and Zeuxis on their panels … Carping envy more readily favours works of false antiquity than those of the present day. (65) Though many have taken this and similar passages as clear evidence of a practice of Roman art forgery, sculptures bearing the signatures of artists other than their makers, Lenain suggests, were not deceptive copies but rather overt homages, their values enhanced by association with their more prestigious forerunners through a sort of ‘symbolic enhancement’. Perhaps Lenain’s scepticism appears hyperbolic as he knocks down case after case by suggesting entirely unknown cultural practices rather than accepting them as precursors to contemporary art forgery, but this much appears sound: even if there was an occasional artisan or merchant who lied about the origin of a work for the sake of jacking up the price, without a practice of art collection, there would have been little reason for a practice of art forgery, and so any such individual act would not have had the cultural relevance that it has today. Instead, Lenain argues, the historical origins of today’s ‘religion’ of art connoisseurship are to be found in medieval relic fetishism, and its reasonable concerns over authenticity. Relics were, after all, literal pieces of saints, or of objects closely associated with them, and were believed to embody the very powers of those individuals. So whether a claimed relic was authentic was of critical importance, and great lengths were taken not only to authenticate, but also to protect, preserve, and showcase these relics. Lenain’s hypothesis is, admittedly, a fascinating suggestion, and he outlines the complex and intriguing history of religious relics in equally fascinating detail. But when he turns to making the connection with art forgery, the implacable incredulity which he brought to bear on purported forgery in the ancient world seems to have been shelved. Looking to texts by Pietro Summonte, Marcantonio Michiel, and Giorgio Vasari, Lenain argues in his third chapter that there began in the late medieval period a veneration of artists as divine and their works as analogous to religious relics. And, just as relics could be duplicated through a sort of divine osmosis without any dampening of their religious powers, so too, Lenain suggests, were artistic duplicates seen as equivalent to their originals. However, where Lenain was willing to accept nothing short of absolute proof of forgery in the ancient world, here he takes a lack of contradictory evidence as proof of his hypothesis. For example, Lenain recounts Summonte’s anecdotes of the painter Colantonio, who produced amazing copies of existing Flemish paintings. Summonte’s short account contains no discussion of the means by which Colantonio managed to create his indistinguishable duplicates, and no moral condemnation of his acts. As such, Lenain contends: [t]he fact that Summonte’s discourse offers nothing of that sort indicates that nothing was really at stake in the anecdote except the demonstration of Colantonio’s glorious mastery and the artistic nobility of perfect copying. (175) The lack of moral condemnation, Lenain contends, can be explained by a belief that the copy was taken as authentically equivalent to the original, just as a religious relic could mystically produce authentic copies of itself. Those painters in the Renaissance and early modern period who were capable of producing amazing duplicates were not condemned, Lenain notes, but venerated. And, Lenain suggests, although Vasari and others did not hold to the trace paradigm, this did not prevent artworks as coming to be seen as authorial ‘relics’. Against this backdrop, Lenain returns in his final chapter to the trace paradigm in contemporary connoisseurship, and works to show how the paradigm is at odds with the ‘perfect fake’ (or, as Lenain prefers, the ‘perfect stylistic duplicate’). The possibility of a perfect fake has long been denounced by art historians and philosophers alike. Historians have suggested that any forgery carries with it traces of its historical origins, and that while these are not always apparent at the time of creation, they begin to stand out as time passes to the point when we wonder how these fakes could ever have passed as originals (the exemplar here being Han van Meegeren’s atrocious and yet largely effective Vermeer forgeries). Nelson Goodman suggests that knowing one of two visually indistinguishable paintings is a fake constitutes an aesthetic difference between the works, a view echoed by Mark Sagoff, Jerrold Levinson, and others. Working against these notions, Eric Hebborn, the twentieth-century forger of works of antiquity, contended that he adopted the very styles of past artists by adopting their idiosyncratic ‘languages’ and worked directly on this basis, rather than attempting to copy any existing work. Another contemporary forger, Tom Keating, professed to having channelled long-dead artists, whose spirits would literally guide his hands. Both Hebborn and Keating in their own ways were claiming to have made originals, not fakes. Forgery, the forgers suggest, comes down to a matter of labelling only. But, of course, this labelling is critical, and by labelling their works as works of others, forgers explode the link between the surface of the work and the work’s origin. Lenain writes: The perfect fake destroys the absolute significance of the trace paradigm both in scientific and experiential terms – not only as far as particular objects are concerned but also with respect to artworks in general, fake or not. Even though that paradigm is still functional in a majority of cases, it will never be possible to consider it as absolutely applicable in any single case: since some artworks have been subjected to perfect stylistic simulation, no artwork can be regarded as the absolute (that is, bi-univocal) manifestation of its origin. (273) Now, it is worth noting that Lenain has not provided us with any criteria for being a ‘perfect fake’, but it is clear that he does not have in mind what, say, Goodman does: something in all ways aesthetically indistinguishable from the original. Rather, it seems, Lenain is thinking of a perfect fake as a perfectly convincing one, or (in the case of a copy of an existing work) one visually indiscernible from the original, and this is, at least in principle, a much less difficult pill to swallow. The artworld has certainly been hoodwinked before, and it would be arrogant to assume there are not at this moment dozens of forgeries hanging in the world’s most respected museums. Now, I am sympathetic to the view that the perfect fake is a real possibility—a possibility, I suspect, largely unaccomplished only because of our current technological limitations—but I question whether the typical connoisseur, historian, or philosopher today buys into the Romantic notion that an artist’s style embodies his personality in the way that the trace paradigm says it does. Rather, I would suggest, the Romantic model at the core of the paradigm has been steadily dwindling since the late nineteenth century, and Lenain admits as much. So it seems that Lenain is suggesting that the existence of the perfect fake (which itself is questionable) destroys the significance of a conceptual framework that few adhere to. In his conclusion, Lenain ultimately suggests that the practice of forgery cannot comfortably be positioned either within or outside of the artworld: a fake—perfect or not—is not a normal artwork, but plays something of a perverse cultural role, and to submit the fake to ordinary aesthetic analysis is to ignore its role as a fake. An interpretation of a forgery, Lenain contends, must not focus centrally on its surface features, but on its cultural role—and this, he notes, is not all that different from how we interpret much contemporary art. While contemporary artists have toyed with our notions of authorship and originality, Lenain notes, this is not the forger’s concern. Unlike contemporary art, the forgery can function as such only as long as the identity of its maker remains hidden—so long as it remains authorless. On this basis, Lenain suggests, ‘[i]f we decide that fakes are artworks, it means that we have to accept the idea of an authorless artwork’ (316). But the cultural nature of such fakes makes it essentially impossible to interpret them as artworks while at the same time recognizing their nature as forgeries. The clash arises from competing conceptions: any interpretation of art requires a concept of authorship, but recognition of forgeries as forgeries requires conceiving of them as authorless. Nevertheless, despite their non-art status, art forgeries are fully relevant to both the history and theory of art. Philosophically speaking, this discussion makes up the most intriguing part of the entire book, and deserves much more discussion than I can devote to it here. For those with a philosophic interest in the nature of forgery and authenticity in art, Lenain’s book would be worth picking up for the final fourteen pages alone. This is not to suggest that the preceding pages are not worth reading, however. Indeed, while Lenain’s underlying philosophical methodology is at times deeply flawed and uneven, his historical accounts are laid out in such rich, engrossing detail that one is willing to look past the framework Lenain has constructed for the sake of some compelling stories, absorbingly told.