Lost in Translation

In 1937, a long-lost Vermeer was revealed at auction, heralded by experts as one of the Dutch painter's greatest works. Only it wasn't a Vermeer at all. A man named Han van Meegeren had produced this and many other expensive forgeries. Once he stepped forward, their value dropped like the jaws on his customers. Why?

They were still the same paintings. Surely the art world has brainwashed us into shelling out for that intangible quality of authenticity. No, says Denis Dutton, a philosopher who has written on art and forgery. "The proper response to art is the response to human achievement, and this means responding to more than a pretty painted surface," he told me a few months ago. "Works of art are intrinsically intentional objects, and they embody thoughts, imagination, creativity, emotion, and intelligence." Further, "we are fundamentally hardwired to respond to human artifacts as intentional objects."

This last claim has found support in a paper published in Cognition in January. An experimenter drew a circle while looking at one of two circular objects on display. After watching the act, 2-year-olds tended to say the drawing represented the object the experimenter had been eyeing. Apparently, we naturally read intention into the production of artifacts--we look at a sketch or a sculpture and wonder, "What was the creator thinking?" As for the van Meegeren case, Denis says, "we want a view into the mind of Vermeer and not a view provided by a third rate 1930's artist who is trying to explain how he thinks Vermeer must have seen the world."

That explains our dismissal of novel fabrications, but what about replications? Indistinguishable duplicates of real masterpieces? Denis says we can never be absolutely sure we're getting everything the original has. Maybe we can't tell the difference today, but what about tomorrow? Okay, I said, but that doesn't explain why a reproduction that captures more than 99% of the original will hold less than 1% of its value. He mentioned a Mona Lisa copyist whose reproductions were more like 99.99% accurate but who told an interviewer that he liked to make small changes. "For example taking the chill out of her smile," Denis said. "That .01% may make all the difference between genius and kitsch."

Small differences may have huge significance in some cases, but there's still a huge fetish factor in our fixation on pieces genuinely produced by the artist. A doodle Picasso made with a crayon sold in 2005 for $40,000, but posters of his greatest works sell at the mall for $10. And I imagine many people would pay more for a handwritten Jane Austen manuscript missing 10% of its words than a complete bound copy. Denis said, "in that case the person is more an autograph collector than a lover of literature," but he acknowledged that art collectors and appreciators have some autograph collector in them.

Have we been indoctrinated to value the personal effects of Very Important People, or are we natural fetishists? There's research here too (also published in Cognition in January, and, interestingly enough, also co-authored by Paul Bloom at Yale.) Here, kids ages 3 to 6 were fooled into believing the experimenters had a duplicating machine. The kids much preferred the option of taking home a spoon touched by Queen Elizabeth II than an identical copy. Apparently there is some nonphysical royal "essence" in the spoon that the replica lacked. When I covered the study for Psychology Today last year, Susan Gelman of the University of Michigan told me that essentialism (belief in essences) "explains why we prefer authentic things, including autographs, original works of art, and Britney Spears' chewed gum."

Essentialism lays the groundwork for sentimentality, which I argue in the March/April issue of Psychology Today is a form of magical thinking. (Law 1: Anything can be sacred.) We believe inanimate objects can contain some of a person's essence, picked up through mere contact, which is why we value family heirlooms and why people say donning Mr. Rogers's sweater will make you friendlier but wearing a Nazi's jacket is creepy. (And I mention a woman who was asked for her autograph simply because she had touched the Beatles.)

I didn't discuss art in the story, but valuing artistic originals involves an extreme form of sentimentality. An original is not just an object that a celebrity or a genius has possessed or touched; it's a work that the artist has slaved over, and it physically manifests his creative insights and energies. The performance is in the product. As Denis said, intentional objects embody thought. And here we have the blending of mind and matter that defines magical thinking.