There is a peculiar thing that can happen to a painting when somebody discovers the wrong name is written at the bottom of it. Nothing about the canvas changes, the colours remain where they were and the brushstrokes do not rearrange themselves in embarrassment. Yet the picture that held your attention five minutes earlier can suddenly become considerably less interesting to everyone in the room.
We have both spent years circling that contradiction, though our routes into art were very different. David has painted extraordinarily convincing versions of works by Picasso, Lowry, Van Gogh, Vermeer and Caravaggio. Luke’s fascination began with graffiti and street culture, where you encountered the work without waiting for a curator, critic or auction house to explain whether it deserved your attention.
Those different experiences have kept bringing us back to the same question: how much of what we think about art comes from the thing hanging in front of us, and how much have we decided before we have properly looked? It is a question we keep returning to while putting David’s work together for The Forger’s Game in Brighton this October. Some of the most interesting reactions are likely to come not from identifying what is “real”, but from noticing how quickly certainty starts to wobble once a familiar name is taken away. That is where art becomes wonderfully contradictory, because we say it should provoke instinctive reactions, then surround it with systems that tell people what those reactions ought to be.
We love art, but we are slightly frightened of it
There is some evidence that this is more than an art-world hunch. Research commissioned by Art Fund found that nine in ten UK parents surveyed believed taking children to museums and galleries was beneficial, yet 65% said they felt too worried or embarrassed to take their children. Nearly one in five worried they would be judged by other visitors. We find that paradox fascinating, because people are effectively saying, “This place is good for us, but I am not entirely convinced we know how to behave once we get inside.”
Nobody puts a sign outside a gallery saying you must understand nineteenth-century French painting before entering, yet people can behave as though one exists. The codes are subtler, from the silence and terminology to the reverence and the sensation that everybody else knows something you do not. That is a feeling we would quite like to interfere with.
Sometimes the label arrives before the painting
We like to think our taste is instinctive, that we respond to an artwork first and only later discover who made it.
Experience suggests the order is often reversed and David once bought an otherwise unremarkable painting for very little money, worked on it and added the initials of Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell. Once the right story and attribution surrounded the object, it acquired a rather grander existence in the market. The interesting part is not simply that somebody was fooled, but what the episode suggests about the way people look.
Give somebody the right name and they start searching for evidence of importance. A brushstroke becomes intentional, an oddity becomes characteristic and something they might otherwise have walked past suddenly deserves prolonged consideration. Remove the name again and nothing physical has changed, yet everything around the painting has. It is difficult not to enjoy the absurdity of that.
Graffiti teaches you the opposite habit
Luke’s interest in art began with graffiti, which might be one reason we keep returning to this idea of permission. As a kid, you could see something painted across a wall and decide instantly whether you thought it was brilliant, funny, aggressive, ugly or technically extraordinary.
You simply looked, without an explanatory card beneath the work or anybody standing nearby to check whether you had reached the culturally approved conclusion. There is something extremely healthy about that relationship with art, because your reaction gets there before anybody else’s authority does.
The most entertaining contradiction in David’s work is that an inauthentic object can produce a completely authentic response. Suppose you stand in front of a painting believing it is by Picasso and you love it. You admire the composition, tell your friend how extraordinary it is and perhaps even feel something profound in front of it.
Then somebody tells you Picasso did not paint it.
What exactly happens to everything you felt thirty seconds earlier?
There is another question hiding beneath that one, too. If discovering who really painted it can completely reverse our emotional response to an unchanged object, were we looking at the painting or its reputation? That is the game we find much more interesting.
Copying turns out to involve an awful lot of originality
Even the word “copy” starts to seem peculiar when you look closely at how convincing recreations are made. David cannot simply stare at a Lowry and reproduce the outline. He has to understand how the painter worked, from the materials he reached for to the way he moved his brush, including where his technique was controlled and where it was idiosyncratic. Eventually, you are attempting to reconstruct decisions rather than simply images.
Lowry is particularly enjoyable because his work appears deceptively straightforward. Those little figures look simple until you try putting one in exactly the right place and discover that moving it half an inch can alter the rhythm of an entire scene.
The eye becomes much sharper when something might be wrong
This is something we have noticed while bringing David’s recreations together for The Forger’s Game in Brighton. Tell somebody that everything in front of them should simply be admired and they may stand politely at a distance. Suggest that there is something to investigate, however, and their entire body language changes.
They lean in.
Suddenly people are examining the paint texture, signs of aging and signatures. They start questioning the edge of a brushstroke and whether Van Gogh really would have attacked that patch of sky in quite that way. People who arrived insisting they knew nothing about art can become extraordinarily opinionated within minutes.
We rather like that transformation.
The “game” is not really about catching a forger. It is about giving people an excuse to look harder than they usually would, and perhaps to discover that they already possess a perfectly useful pair of eyes.
That is much closer to what we think an encounter with art should feel like.
Would you actually put Picasso above the sofa?
There is another contradiction we enjoy because it becomes more ridiculous the longer you think about it. Imagine owning a tremendously valuable original Picasso. Would you actually hang it above the sofa?
Suddenly sunlight is the enemy, children become a security risk and every guest carrying red wine needs to be quietly followed around the room. Before long, your painting has become an extremely anxious financial instrument with a picture on the front. Now imagine a brilliantly painted recreation hanging in exactly the same place. You know Picasso never touched it, which clearly changes its historical and financial significance, but you can get close to it, live beside it and notice something different while eating toast on a Tuesday morning.
Which object is more valuable?
The irritating answer is both, depending on what you mean by value.
One has rarity, history, authorship and immense financial worth, while the other might spend considerably more of its existence actually being enjoyed as a painting.
Visual art also has an oddly fraught relationship with reproduction compared with other forms of culture. Nobody goes to see Hamlet and complains that the actor is not Laurence Olivier. Musicians perform songs written by other musicians every evening and chefs devote careers to interpreting dishes they did not invent. We understand that interpretation can involve enormous skill without confusing the performer with the originator.
Painting becomes more complicated because the physical object itself carries value. There is only one original canvas, which makes authenticity part of what is being bought and protected, and rightly so. But recognising that difference does not require us to pretend a hand-painted recreation is devoid of craftsmanship, or that our response to it becomes invalid because somebody else conceived the original image.
If 65% of parents in that Art Fund survey feel worried or embarrassed about bringing their children into museums and galleries, despite overwhelmingly believing those visits are good for them, perhaps making art accessible means more than opening the doors. People have to feel they are allowed to make noise intellectually as well.
That is something we are conscious of with David’s work in Brighton this October, too. When The Forger’s Game asks people to look closely and trust their own eyes, children and families should feel just as entitled to join in as collectors, critics or anyone who knows their Caravaggios from their Canalettos. They should be able to say the famous painting leaves them cold, the supposedly difficult one makes immediate sense or the recreation is the thing they cannot stop looking at. Nobody should require several years of study before being permitted a bad opinion about Picasso.
Perhaps the real trick is looking before knowing
The more time we spend around art, the more we think there is value in occasionally reversing the usual order.
Look first.
Before reading the artist’s name, price, movement, provenance or catalogue essay, see where your eye goes. Notice whether you want to move closer, whether something irritates you and whether the picture keeps pulling your attention back.
Then learn everything else.
Knowledge can make a painting immeasurably richer, but it should deepen an encounter rather than authorise one.
That is ultimately what connects The Forger’s Game, Luke’s fascination with graffiti and David’s lifetime spent learning what makes one painter’s hand recognisable from another. They all bring us back to the same slightly troublesome question: what do we see when nobody has yet told us what we are looking at?
The answer might occasionally make the art world uncomfortable.
Good. Art has survived much worse.
