If you want to write about art for a wide audience, you may find yourself needing not just an argument about your particular art works, but one for art itself. Orson Welles’ F for Fake (1975) tells several stories. The first is about an art forger, the next is about his equally deceitful biographer. But through it all, Welles’ film creates an essay in images arguing in defense of our desire to be beguiled by sight. Though the film repeats the claim that the art market creates forgers, its main point has nothing to do with the economics of art. In fact, Welles interrupts his tale of fakes and deals to meditate for several minutes on the cathedral of Chartres, its anonymous and long-dead artists, and art as a human achievement that outlasts temporal concerns.
What does Welles have to do with Svetlana Alpers and Rembrandt? Both F for Fake and Alpers’ Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market grapple with the issue of individual artistic mastery as expressed in disputes about authenticity. Welles shows us an art forger creating a Picasso, a Matisse, a Modigliani, and then tossing them onto the fire. He praises anonymous artists, smiles at experts, and all the while leads the viewer masterfully by the nose as only an artist of Orson Welles skill can.
Alpers begins with the popular image of Rembrandt as a standard of quality (luxury cars and celebrity faces are compared equated with Rembrandt’s work, etc) and the source of repeated disputes about attribution. In both cases, the idea of artistic genius is both deconstructed and reconstructed. For Welles, the genius of the forger is identical with the genius of art. It rests on the ability to transform our way of seeing and is both individual and collective. For Alpers, Rembrandt’s mastery is both socially constructed through his marketplace strategies and present in his work. Rembrandt creates something great, says Alpers, because he shapes the definition of artistic greatness in his time and in ours.
What’s more, all of our contemporary Rembrandt anxiety–about dizzyingly high prices for his work, about the proliferation of fakes or misattributed Rembrandts, and about the rather shifty man behind it all–are Rembrandt’s own doing. The painter emerges as a master of the marketplace and of the studio, one who creates and manipulates the standard of success in both realms.
[H]is works are commodities distinguished from others by being identified as his; and in making them, he in turn commodifies himself. He loved only his freedom, art, and money, to recall the words of Descamps. Or, put differently, so as to bring out connections between the terms, Rembrandt was an entrepreneur of the self. (Alpers, p.118)
Alpers’ stylistic and structural triumph in Rembrandt’s Enterprise lies in her ability to show us the individual thoroughly embedded in the market while attending equally to the artist as an individual. And like Welles, Alpers makes value judgments.
It is now generally acknowledged that the nineteenth century shaped its myth of the lone genius out of a selective reading of Rembrandt’s life and his art. But are there not things about the paintings that accommodate them to such a view? (Alpers, p. 3)
Rembrandt’s work is better, she argues. It deserves to be in its own category. And as for the copies and school-of-Rembrandt paintings, Alpers is arguing that a painting that resembles a Rembrandt partakes of its greater artistic mastery. In fact, it’s surprising to see critics of Alpers who charge her with attempting to diminish Rembrandt’s artistry. The idea that economic interest must be opposed to artistry, rather than intertwined with it, may lie beneath that criticism.
Welles boldly challenges the viewer to consider whether the forgers spurred on by the art market aren’t also great artists. Alpers insists that sharp economic calculation might be as inspiring as the artist’s muse. Both offer viewers a new way of looking closely at art and seeing another human dimension in it.