Detecting Forgery & Cultural Bias
Forgery is much harder than it seems but detecting your own cultural biases are even harder.
Even after you have got all the right chemicals with all the right isotope ratios, after you have got the right age canvas, and the nails from the period etc., it is still hard. There always remains the weak link in the chain - the internal makeup of the forger. The forger must introduce himself in some way into the painting just as the original artist introduced himself. The author's own experiments in reproduction verify this statement and point to ways in which forgeries can be created and detected.
Leonardo D'Vinci wrote a book on how to paint, and I believe he wrote other books as well. And his advise to young artists was to paint people that others considered beautiful - or risk painting yourself over and over again. Why is that? Well we paint that with which we are familiar. If we take Leonardo at his word we should be able to flush his face out of his paintings. Here we speculate that Leonardo rather resembled the Mona Lisa when he was younger.
But since I never believe anything without an experiment I tried the same thing. It turns out that when I tried to reproduce one of the most famous paintings ever I did not paint myself, instead I made the mistake of painting an important person in my life rather than girl in the painting “The Girl with the Pearl Ear Ring” of Vermeer.
The differences in color are due more to camera failings than actual color differences. But the point remains that I did not paint the same girl. You can see the differences in the nose, chin and cheek bones. I want to recommend trying to paint from the old masters. There are hidden secrets you will never find as a mere observer, trying to create the forgery has it's own lessons. When I went to paint the lips I noticed that the rouge of the lips had somehow migrated off the lips of the young lady and became slightly smeared around her mouth. Perhaps there was a romantic interlude during the painting?
Here is my attempt at Cezanne's "Still Life with Peaches" Again I failed. I paint my peaches not Cezanne's.
You can see how I paint peaches on the right. The brushwork absolutely wrong for Cezanne but right for me. If you look at the still life on the left you will be shocked by how out of place my peaches are in a Cezanne painting.
Now I'm clearly an amateur forger what about well known forgers?
VanMeegeren was, arguably, the most successful forger of all time and managed to sell his painting to major museums and even Herman Goering as lost Vermeers'. His Christ at Emmaus shows the influence of his age in the shape of the face and eyes that were considered contemporaneously beautiful - but which jars with our sense of a Vermeer face. However it “worked” because others of that age also believed in the beauty of this type of face. It is as difficult for us to overcome our bias as viewers, as it is for the artist. This allows certain mistakes to go unnoticed by us in our current environment, but to be clear as day to a later generation.
Of course that arm would never have been painted by Vermeer. Look at how flat and disconnected it is. Is that arm even possible?
So here is your challenge. How does one see her own culture? To make it visible and not invisible? With the current melt down in China are we right to believe in economics?
VP of Strategy ? Chief of Staff ? I Help Companies Harness AI to Measure What Matters and Avoid Business Transformation Failure ? Coke, Whole Foods, P&G ? PROSCI, Agile, Design Thinking ? Quoted in WSJ, Fortune, and INC.
9 年Perhaps you can flip the lesson here, John Ryan: Attempt to forge or copy someone else's "cargo cult" strategic methodology or best practice (such as "lean startup" or Zappos' Happiness Culture) and personal and corporate cultural biases will inhibit your ability to duplicate the results. In other words, the best strategy is your own strategy, based on your unique landscape and perspective. It would be interesting to employ empirical research methods to validate your dynamic hypothesis. c: Felix Hovsepian
Heart-Founder at HeartBeats Foundation (io)
9 年We shouldn't believe in economics but more in the people who represent it. As we are not totally replaced by robotics and 'artificial' (bio) intelligence we should accept that unlimited growth is an illusion. Reproduction is all we are by the laws of nature. We have to accept this and go back to basics. Improve life one step at a time.
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9 年PROJECT SYNDICATE, February 9, 2016: China’s Exchange-Rate Trap, By Barry Eichengreen, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley; Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge; and a former senior policy adviser at the International Monetary Fund, his latest book being Hall of Mirrors:The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses – and Misuses – of History, https://bit.ly/20yKmYX. A few observers, like Bank of Japan head Haruhiko Kuroda, have suggested that China might consider tightening controls, Kuroda Advises China to Impose Capital Controls to Defend Yuan, https://bloom.bg/1WFXBXs. But most economists are reluctant to contemplate this option. Capital controls would undermine China’s efforts to internationalize the renminbi and would embarrass the International Monetary Fund, which recently added the currency to the basket of four major currencies underpinning its unit of account, the Special Drawing Rights -SDR. The most powerful objection, though, is that reimposing controls would remove the pressure to reform. Freed of pressure from international capital markets, the Chinese authorities would defer to state-owned enterprises and local officials who prefer continued easy provision of liquidity and would rather see the banks simply roll over their loans. This risk of backsliding is real. If it materializes, the time bought by capital controls will be squandered. The problem would then metastasize, at some point, from an exchange-rate crisis to a growth collapse. China’s best hope – and the world’s – is that the Chinese authorities understand that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-renminbi-crisis-capital-controls-by-barry-eichengreen-2016-02#4YvuFSsCq84kK1dv.99
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9 年John, forgery is such an interesting subject in its own right. I noticed your attempt at a Vermeer, but it was instantly obvious what was wrong - but then that picture is very familiar (your picture of Scarlett Johanson didn't quite capture the cheekbones (lol)). It is interesting that VanMeegeren didn't present the work himself but used the vanity of the art experts to do it for him. This has been the problem with the art world for years. Your final paragrah does indeed ask an intriguing question. Perhaps part of the problem is that a lot of people jump on the same bandwagon of belief without questioning it believing it to be the whole answer, instead of it being merely a snapshot without depth.
Environmental Data Specialist
9 年John, what a fabulous post. Like you I have both an art and mathematics background, ( but judging by your 'copies' I don't have your talent). My favorite art courses were in design. That being said, that is the area of analytics that I thrive on; design, finding the variables (colors) and blending them until you get that just-right hue. The problem with this are the unforeseen changes or influences. I could present all the numbers, believing that they were as accurate as I could possibly make them, but in the end they are only as good as the data available. Either I or the data was wrong or...something changed. I heard the phrase "numbers don't lie" so many times, but I like to responded; "but people do, or at least they can make changes that we aren't capturing". In steps that human variable. It eventually boils down to self-interest (painting themselves) that changes results completely.