Celebrating fakes is moronic ... it’s real art that matters
|
Version 0 of 1. Fakes are fun. Fakes are cool. This week, Dulwich Picture Gallery launched a conceptual art project in which a replica made in China is concealed among its “real” paintings. Can visitors spot the fake? The intervention, said the gallery’s director, “will provoke a new way of looking at our collection”. No, it won’t. It will confuse the public, undermine the pleasure of looking at the great paintings on its walls, and replace the joy of learning about art with a glib postmodern game that is pretentious and destructive. I personally don’t intend to go anywhere near Dulwich until this silliness is done with. Fakes are not fun. They are not cool. And the postmodernist cult of the replica is getting seriously old. Umberto Eco wrote his seminal essay on this theme, Faith in Fakes, decades ago. The easy claim that replicas are just as good as the real thing and no one can tell them apart anyway is now a hackneyed idea, recently wheeled out like the most boring of dinner party bons mots when the V&A reopened its Renaissance cast court. Why do we think it’s so clever to confuse fakes and reality? I love the Victorian wonders in the V&A’s collection of casts. It is a delight to explore the imagery of gothic pulpits and study Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise through life-size replicas. But it’s absurd to see the cast courts as some kind of clever celebration of the simulacrum versus the real thing. The Victorians who collected these “fakes” intended nothing of the kind. The cast courts are not meant to replace reality. The casts are educational resources. You can learn a lot from looking at a cast of Michelangelo’s David. But there is a vast gulf between the copy and the original. Compared with the incredible flux and vitality of Michelangelo’s actual works, which pulse with energy, the casts at the V&A are just dead pieces of plaster. They were never meant to be anything but a rough guide, a preparation for a true encounter with great art. In the V&A itself, you can compare casts of the works of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano with their real works. The casts are informative; the originals are art. No copy could be as moving as Giovanni Pisano’s actual Crucified Christ. It’s shallow and trite to misunderstand the V&A’s amazing casts as better than the real thing when what they really do is supplement and contextualise this museum’s great collection of original works. It is equally daft to think a hidden fake adds to the interest of Dulwich Picture Gallery’s paintings. The anxiety it creates can only detract from a genuine experience of the collection. Museums should not join in the moronic celebration of the replica. Their job is to preserve originals, and make those accessible. Art only matters when it is the real thing. |