I

In 1968, Nelson Goodman made an observation about artistic forgery that has never been fully appreciated, though his discussion of forgery has received plenty of philosophical attention. Goodman describes the case in which you, the viewer, are confronted with an original work and a forgery that is, for you, perceptually indistinguishable from it. On the basis of lab tests, you know which of the works is forged, but you can see no difference between them. Nonetheless, Goodman says, the knowledge that one of them is forged makes for an aesthetic difference between the works, for you, now. One reason is that this knowledge changes the way you look at the works, and the way you should look at them; it alters the sorts of scrutiny it is appropriate to apply. In fact, knowledge that one of the works is forged 'assigns the present looking a role as training toward ... perceptual discrimination' (Goodman, 1976, 105).

Goodman might easily be misconstrued as offering an argument for the aesthetic inferiority of forgeries. It might be assumed that what we are looking for when we scrutinize an illegitimate copy is evidence that it is worse than the original. Therefore, the aesthetic difference that exists even before we are able to see a difference between the two is a difference in value, of course favoring the original. But Goodman explicitly denies that he is arguing for the aesthetic inferiority of forgeries (Goodman, 1976, 109). Moreover, his view implies that known forgeries may provide an important benefit. Knowledge that a work is forged leads us to employ our perceptual faculties more rigorously, to seek for distinctions not presently available to us. A known forgery can help to hone our aesthetic sensibilities, whether it is better or worse than the relevant class of originals.

In this discussion, I will embed Goodman's observation about the benefits of forgery in a theory of aesthetic understanding. Aesthetic understanding, I will suggest, is a matter of bootstrapping that involves reliance on experts and, especially, artists whom we suspect of superior aesthetic understanding, though we don't know precisely in what that understanding consists. Some commentators have suggested that our aesthetic rejection of forgeries, once discovered, is a variety of snobbishness, of relying on the prestige of great names rather than on pure aesthetic qualities to determine which works we will favor. On my view, some of this so-called snobbishness, or prima facie reliance on acknowledged aesthetic experts, which clearly does constitute a substantial part of our aesthetic practice, is both appropriate and necessary for the enhancement of aesthetic understanding. For this reason, as I will show, the harm associated with undetected forgery is potentially much more severe than has previously been recognized.

The aesthetic harm perpetrated by forgery has typically been located quite narrowly, centering on the forged artwork itself. A work's being a forgery is thought to invalidate it as an artwork (e.g., Danto, 1973) or, more commonly, to invalidate any aesthetic judgments we might make about it while assuming it to be genuine (e.g., Sagoff, 1976; Dutton, 1983). This characterization of the aesthetic problem with forgery is inadequate for two reasons. First, as Goodman's example suggests, the fact that a work is a forgery need not disqualify it from aesthetic consideration; nor, as I will argue, need it invalidate every aesthetic judgment made about the work when taken to be genuine. Second, and more importantly, this characterization seriously underestimates the scope of the harm potentially perpetrated by an undetected forgery. As Goodman pointed out, a known forgery may promote the development of aesthetic capacities that can then be applied quite broadly. In a similar way, as I will show, an undetected forgery may compromise our aesthetic understanding across a wide range of cases, extending far beyond the forgery itself and the class of works to which it is...