The Act of Creation

by Arthur Koestler

  My point is not the fallibility of the experts. Herr Malskat's exploit is merely one of a number of similarly successful hoaxes and forgeries -- of which the most fabulous were probably van Megeeren's faked Vermeers. The disturbing question which they raise is whether the Lübeck saints are less beautiful, and have ceased to be 'a valuable treasure of masterpieces', simply because they had been painted by Herr Malskat and not by somebody else? And furthermore, if van Megeeren can paint Vermeers as good as Vermeer himself, why should they be taken off the walls of the Dutch and other National Galleries? If even the experts were unable to detect the difference, then surely the false Vermeers must procure as much aesthetic pleasure to the common run of Museum visitors as the authentic ones. All the curators would have to do is to change the name on the catalogue from Vermeer to van Megeeren.

  There are several answers to this line of argument, but before going into them I want to continue in the part of the devil's advocate by considering an example of a forgery in a different field: Macpherson's Ossian. The case is so notorious that the facts need only be briefly mentioned. James Macpherson (1736-1796), a Scottish poet and adventurer, alleged that in the course of his wanderings in the Highlands he had discovered some ancient Gaelic manuscripts. Enthusiastic Scottish littérateurs put up a subscription to enable Macpherson to pursue his researches, and in 1761 he published Fingal, an ancient Epic Poem in Six Books, together with several other poems composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal. Ossian is the legendary third-century hero and bard of Celtic literature. "Fingal" was soon followed by the publication of a still larger Ossianic epic called Temora, and this by a collected edition, The Works of Ossian. The authenticity of Macpherson's text was at once questioned in England, particularly by Dr. Johnson (whom Macpherson answered by sending him a challenge to a duel), and to his death Macpherson refused, under various unconvincing pretexts, to publish his alleged Gaelic originals. By the turn of the century the controversy was settled; it was established that while Macpherson had used fragments of ancient Celtic lore, most of the 'Ossianic texts' were of his own making.

  Yet here again the question arises whether the poetic quality of the work itself is altered by the fact that it was written not by Ossian the son of Fingal, but by James Macpherson? The 'Ossianic' texts were translated into many languages, and had a considerable influence on the literature and cultural climate of Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is how the Encyclopedia Britannica sums up its evaluation of Macpherson (my italics):

  The varied sources of his work and its worthlessness as a transcript of actual Celtic poems do not alter the fact that he produced a work of art which . . . did more than any single work to bring about the romantic movement in European, and especially in German, literature . . . Herder and Goethe . . . were among its profound admirers.

  These examples could be continued indefinitely. Antique furniture, Greek tanagra figures, Gothic madonnas, old and modern masters are being forged, copied, counterfeited all the time, and the value we set on the object is not determined by aesthetic appreciation and pleasure to the eye, but by the precarious and fallible judgement of experts. And it will always be fallible for the good and simple reason that genius consists not in the perfect exercise of a technique, but in its invention; once the technique is established, diligent pupils and imitators can produce works in the master's idiom which are often indistinguishable, and sometimes technically more accomplished than his.

  Some years ago, at a fancy-dress ball -- in Monte Carlo, I believe -- a competition was held to decide which among the dozen or so guests masquerading as Charlie Chaplin came nearest to the original. Chaplin himself happened to be among them -- and got only the third prize. In 1962, the Fogg museum of Harvard arranged a private exhibition for connoisseurs, where some of the exhibits were fakes, others genuine; the guests were to decide which was which. Included were, among other items, an original portrait by Annibale Carracci, one of the most influential painters of the Italian baroque, and a contemporary copy thereof; also an original Picasso drawing of a Mother and Child, and two forgeries thereof. The result was similar to that of the Chaplin competition; among those who plumped for one of the forgeries were the chairman of Princeton's Art Department and the Secretary of the Fogg; the director of the Metropolitan Museum refused to submit to the test, while other experts 'scored themselves on sheets of paper, compared their verdicts with the officially announced facts, and quietly crumpled their papers'. [2]

  Let me repeat: the principal mark of genius is not perfection, but originality, the opening of new frontiers; once this is done, the conquered territory becomes common property. The fact that even professional experts are unable to point out the difference in artistic merit between the true and the false Picasso, Caracci, or Vermeer, is conclusive proof that no such difference can he registered by the layman's eye. Are we, then, all snobs to whom a signature, an expert testimony based on X-ray photography, or the postmark of a period is more important than the intrinsic beauty of the object itself? And what about the contested works of Shakespeare and Johann Sebastian Bach? Are their dramatic and poetic and harmonic qualities dependent on the technical controversies between specialists?

  The answer, I believe, can be summed up in a single sentence: our appraisal of a work of art or literature is hardly ever a unitary act, and mostly the result of two or more independent and simultaneous processes which interfere with and tend to distort each other. Let me illustrate this by a story which I have told elsewhere at greater length. [3]

  A friend of mine, whom I shall call Catherine, was given as a present by an unobtrusive admirer a drawing from Picasso's classical period; she took it to be a reproduction and hung it in her staircase. On my next visit to her house, it was hanging over the mantelpiece in the drawing-room: the supposed reproduction had turned out to be an original. But as it was a line-drawing in ink, black contour on white paper, it needed an expert, or at least a good magnifying lens, to show that it was the original and not a lithograph or reproduction. Neither Catherine, nor any of her friends, could tell the difference. Yet her appreciation of it had completely changed, as the promotion from staircase to drawing-room showed. I asked her to explain the reason for her change of attitude to the thing on the wall which in itself had not changed at all; she answered, surprised at my stupidity, that of course the thing had not changed, but that she saw it differently since she knew that it was done by Picasso himself and 'not just a reproduction'. I then asked what considerations determined her attitude to pictures in general and she replied with equal sincerity that they were, of course, considerations of aesthetic quality -- 'composition, colour, harmony, power, what have you'. She honestly believed to be guided by purely aesthetic value-judgements based on those qualities; but if that was the case, since the qualities of the picture had not changed, how could her attitude to it have changed?

  I was labouring a seemingly obvious point, yet she was unable to see that she was contradicting herself. It proved quite useless repeating to her that the origin and rarity-value of the object did not alter its qualities -- and, accordingly, should not have altered her appreciation of it, if it had really been based on purely aesthetic criteria as she believed it to be. In reality, of course, her attitude was determined not by those criteria, but by an accidental bit of information -- which might be right or wrong, and was entirely extraneous to the question of aesthetic value. Yet she was by no means stupid; in fact there is something of her confusion in all of us. We all tend to believe that our attitude to an object of art is determined by aesthetic considerations alone, whereas it is decisively influenced by factors of a quite different order. We are unable to see a work of an isolated from the context of its origin or history; and if Catherine were to learn that her Picasso was after all a reproduction, her attitude would again change according to the changed context. Moreover, most people get quite indignant when one suggests to them that the origin of a picture has nothing to do with its aesthetic value
as such. For, in our minds, the question of period, authorship, and authenticity, though in itself extraneous to aesthetic value, is so intimately mixed up with it, that we find it well-nigh impossible to unscramble them. The phenomenon of snobbery, in all its crude and subtle variants, can always be traced back to some confusion of this type.

  Thus Catherine would not be a snob if she had said: 'A reproduction of this line-drawing is to all practical purposes indistinguishable from the original, and therefore just as beautiful as the original. Nevertheless, one gives me a greater thrill than the other, for reasons which have nothing to do with beauty.' But alas, she is incapable of disentangling the two different elements which determine her reactions, and to a greater or lesser extent we are all victims of the same confusion. The change in our attitude, and in the an dealer's price, when it is discovered that a cracked and blackened piece of landscape displaying three sheep and a windmill, bears the signature of Broeckendael the Elder, has nothing to do with beauty, aesthetics, or what have you. And yet, God help us, the sheep and the mill and the brook do suddenly look different and more attractive -- even to the hard-boiled dealer. What happened was that a bit of incidental information cast a ray of golden sunlight on those miserable sheep; a ray emitted not by the pigment but by the cerebral cortex of the art-snob.

  The Personal Emanation

  Let me now present the case for the defence. The appraisal of a work of art is generally the result of two or more independent processes which interact with each other. One complex process constitutes the aesthetic experience as such, which has been discussed in previous chapters; it implies a system of values, and certain criteria of excellence, on which we believe our judgement to be based. But other processes interfere with it, with their different systems of values, and distort our judgements. I shall mention two types of such interfering systems.

  The first is summed up in the statement of a little girl of twelve, the daughter of a friend, who was taken to the Greenwich Museum, and when asked to name the most beautiful thing she had seen there, declared without hesitation: 'Nelson's shirt.' When asked what was so beautiful about it, she explained: 'That shirt with blood on it was jolly nice. Fancy real blood on a real shirt which belonged to somebody really historic.'

  Her sense of values, unlike Catherine's, was still unspoilt. The emotion that she had experienced was derived from the same kind of magic that emanates from Napoleon's inkpot, the relic of the saint carried in the annual procession, the rope by which a famous murderer was hanged, the galley-proof corrected by Tolstoy's hand. Our forbears believed that an object which had been in the possession of a person became imbued with his emanations, and in turn emanated something of his substance. 'There is, I am sure,' a columnist wrote in the "Daily Express", 'for most of us a special pleasure in sinking your teeth into a peach produced on the estate of an Earl who is related to the Royal Family.' [4] You might even come to feel that you are a member of the family if you persist long enough in this somewhat indirect method of transubstantiation.

  We can no more escape the pull of magic inside us than the pull of gravity. Its manifestations may take a more or less dignified form; but the value we set on the peach from the Earl's estate or the splinter from the saint's bone, on Dickens's quill or Galileo's telescope, is derived from the same source of sympathetic magic. It is, as the little girl said, jolly nice to behold a fragment of a marble by Praxiteles -- although it has been battered out of human shape, with a leper's nose and broken ears. The contact with the master's hand has imbued it with a kind of effluvium which has lingered on, and emanates the same thrill as the real blood on Nelson's shirt -- or the real ink from Picasso's pen.

  The inordinate importance that we attribute to the original and authenticated, even in those borderline cases where only the expert can decide on questions of authenticity, has its unconscious roots in this particular kind of fetish-worship. Hence its compelling power -- who would not cherish a lock from an Egyptian mummy's head? Yet, as every honest art dealer will admit, borderline cases are so frequent as to be almost the rule. I am no longer referring to forgeries, but to the classical practice of the master letting his pupils, apprenticed to his workshop, assist in the execution of larger undertakings; and 'assistance' could mean anything from the filling in of background and minor details, to the painting of a whole picture after the master's sketch. We are made to realize how common this practice was by the emphasis which Michelangelo's admiring contemporaries put on the fact that he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel 'alone and unaided'. If we remember that even the experts were at a loss to tell the Caracci portrait from its contemporary copy -- probably by a pupil -- we must conclude that for the great majority of mortals, including connoisseurs, the difference between an authenticated masterpiece, a doubtful attribution, and a work 'from the school of', is in most cases not discernible. But the fact remains that an 'attribution', perfect in its genre but not authenticated, is held in lower esteem than a work of lesser perfection, guaranteed to have come from the ageing master's hand. It is not the eye that guides the museum visitor, but the magic of names. The English nation forked out a million pounds to prevent the sale to America of a Leonardo sketch to which it had never paid any attention; and the hundreds of thousands of good citizens who queued to see it could not have told it from a page in an art-student's sketchbook; they went to see Nelson's shirt.

  The Antiquarian Fallacy

  The second 'interfering system' is period consciousness. A Byzantine icon, or a Pompeian fresco is not enjoyed at its face value, but by a part-conscious attunement of the mind to the values and techniques of the time. Even in paintings from periods whose idiom is much closer to ours -- a Holbein portrait, for instance -- such externals as costume and headdress drive it mercilessly home to us that the man with the unforgettable, timeless face belonged to the court of Henry VIII. The archetypal quality is there, but period-consciousness intrudes; and the danger is that it may dominate the field.

  Thus we look at an old picture through a double frame: the solid gilt frame which isolates it from its surroundings and creates for it a hole in space; and the period-frame in our minds which creates for it a hole in time, and assigns its place on the stage of history. Each time we think we are making a purely aesthetic judgemerit according to our lights, the stage-lights interfere. When we contemplate the Gothic wall-paintings on the church in Lübeck for the first time, believing them to be authentic, and then a second time, knowing that they were made by Herr Malskat, our experience will indeed be completely changed, although the frescoes are the same as at the time when they were hailed as masterpieces. The period-frame has been changed, and with it the stage-lights.

  Apart from being unavoidable, this relativism of aesthetic judgement has its positive sides: by entering into the spirit and climate of the period, we automatically make allowances for its crudities of technique, for its conventions and blind spots; we bend over the past with a tender antiquarian stoop. But this gesture degenerates into antiquarian snobbery at the point where the period-frame becomes more important than the picture, and perverts our scale of values. The symptoms are all too familiar: indiscriminate reverence for anything classified as Italian Primitive or Austrian Baroque (including its mass-produced puffy, chubby, winged little horrors); collective shifts of period-consciousness (from anti-Victorian to pro-Victorian in recent years); the inanities of fashion (Fra Angelico is 'in', Botticelli is 'out').

  The Comforts of Sterility,

  The mechanism responsible for these perversions is the same as discussed previously, and provides us with a handy definition: "snobbery is the result of a mix-up between two frames of reference, A and B, with different standards of value; and the consequent misapplication of standard A to value-judgements referring to B". The art-snob's pleasures are derived not from the picture, but from the catalogue; and the social snob's choice of company is not guided by human value, but by rank or celebrity value catalogued in the pages of Who's Who. The confusion may
even affect his biological drives -- his taste and smell preferences, his sexual inclinations. A hundred years ago, when oysters were the diet of the poor, the snob's taste-buds functioned in a different manner. In the days before Hitler there was a young woman in Berlin who worked for a publisher and was well known in the literary world for a certain peculiarity: she had carried on a number of affairs with authors, regardless of age or sex -- but only with those whose books had sold more than 20,000 copies. Her own explanation was that with less successful authors she was unable to obtain physical satisfaction.

  It is a depressing anecdote because it has a ring of clinical authenticity; at the same time it displays the familiar pattern of the comic: the clash of two incompatible contexts. But to the poor heroine of the story it was no joke, because she could not see their incompatibility; the Kama Sutra and the best-seller list were hopelessly mixed up in her mind. The reader may have wondered why I have devoted a whole chapter of this book on human creativity to the seemingly trivial subject of snobbery. The answer is in the question: snobbery is, I believe, by no means a trivial phenomenon, but a confusion of values which, in various forms, permeates all strata of civilized societies, present and past (see, for instance, Petronius's Banquet of Trimalchio); and it is in many respects a negation of the principle of creativity.