Watching Them Turn Off the Rothkos - The New Yorker - 4 views
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Mainly, I think, the restoration story gets people hooked because it raises ancient and endlessly fascinating philosophy-of-art questions. In this respect, the restored murals are really a new work, a work of conceptual art. To look at them is to have thoughts about the nature of art. When I was a student, I went to a class taught by the art historian Meyer Schapiro. There were lots of people in the room; I think it was supposed to be his last class. (This was at Columbia, where Schapiro had been, as a student and a professor, since 1920.) He devoted the entire opening lecture to forgeries. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to hear him talk about paintings, not fakes. I didn’t go back.
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Which shows how clueless I was, even then. Forgery is important because it exposes the ideological character of aesthetic experience. We’re actually not, or not only, or never entirely, responding to an art object via its physical attributes. What we’re seeing is not just what we see. We bring with us a lot of non-sensory values—one of which is authenticity.
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We’re not absolutists about it. Authenticity is a relative term. Most people don’t undergo mild epistemological queasiness while they’re looking at a conventionally restored Rothko. We look at restored art in museums all the time, and we rarely worry that it’s insufficiently authentic. In the case of the Harvard Rothkos, though, the fact that the faded painting and the faked painting are in front of us at the same time somehow makes for a discordant aesthetic experience. It’s as though, at four o’clock every day, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes turned into the ordinary Brillo cartons of which they were designed to be simulacra. You would no longer be sure what you were looking at.