The Tokushima Modern Art Museum in Japan was duped in a major art fraud more than 25 years ago. This revelation came earlier this month when it published an investigation into an early Cubist painting that turned out to be a fake by a famous forger. The museum had one of the four forgeries recently discovered in Japan, all now said to be by Wolfgang Beltracchi, who was convicted in Germany in 2011 for faking masterworks and who now says he painted in the styles of more than 100 artists. The discoveries have rocked the fine art scene and sparked a debate about value, authority and authenticity.
That debate usually returns to the same questions. Why should it matter who made a painting? If experts praised it before the truth emerged, why does its standing collapse once it is exposed as fake? These questions are old, but recent works in psychology and philosophy help explain why reactions to forgery are both predictable and intense.
Research shows that people do not judge art purely by appearance. When viewers are shown the same image but given different labels such as original, copy or forgery, their evaluations change sharply. Works labelled as forgeries are rated as less impressive, less valuable and less meaningful, even though the image itself is identical. Brain imaging studies reinforce this: artworks believed to be authentic activate areas linked to reward and value more strongly than those labelled as copies. The disappointment triggered by a forgery is therefore not just embarrassment or social pressure. The experience of the work itself is altered.
Take, for instance, a painting once celebrated as a long-lost Johannes Vermeer that hung in a Dutch museum for years and was praised by leading experts. After the artist, Han van Meegeren, admitted he had forged it, the same work was dismissed as worthless. Nothing on the canvas had changed save for beliefs about authorship. One reason for this response is that people treat artworks as records of human action. Viewers assume that a painting is the result of deliberate decisions made by a particular person. Those decisions matter because they anchor judgements about creativity and originality. When a work turns out to be a forgery, the assumed link to a recognised artist disappears. The painting no longer feels like evidence of that artist’s thinking or skill.
This has been tested directly in experiments. Participants are shown two identical images and told that one was made by the artist and the other by the artist’s assistant. Both are signed and both are said to have the same market value. On basic questions, such as which image looks better or which they like more, people treat the two copies as equal. But on questions about creativity, originality and influence, they consistently favour the artist’s copy. The assistant’s version is judged as less significant despite being visually identical and non-deceptive. This shows that responses are driven by beliefs about authorship, and not by price alone. A similar pattern appears in reactions to abstract art, which is often dismissed as random or meaningless. Yet studies show that people can reliably distinguish between abstract works by trained artists and those made by children or animals.
These findings point to an undeniable fact — art is evaluated partly through inferred intention. People are not only seeing colours and shapes: they are judging whether a work appears to be the result of thoughtful human decision-making. This is why forgeries are so disruptive. Once belief in the maker collapses, the work loses a central source of its meaning. Authenticity in art matters not just for its market value but because it feels like a meeting of minds across time and distance. Remove the human source — it can be replaced with an apprentice of a master, a forger, or even a machine — and the encounter loses its charge.