Sailee Khurjekar.

Sailee will present her paper, In Art We Trust: An Exploration into the Problem of Perfect Forgeries, in room S0.08. The session will be hybrid, so you can either join via Teams or attend in person. If the latter, please show your interest in advance by sending an email to our brand new email address (pgphil.wips@warwick.ac.uk), so we are sure to have enough space for everybody.

 Here is the abstract of Sailee’s talk:

This presentation focuses on referential forgeries and examines the loss of trust and abuse of power that occurs when an artwork is forged. I contextualise the problem of perfect forgeries in contemporary debates, comparing Sherrie Levine’s photographs of Walker Evans’ photography with art forger Yves Chaudron’s copies of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. I explain why I think that Levine is not a forger, while Chaudron certainly is. I raise some broader implications of this position for aesthetics as a discipline: The first concerns the role of lying in art and why it is problematic; and the second concerns the false understanding of culture when an artist appropriates a work from another culture and/or race. And so, I try to show how forgeries corrupt the observer’s understanding of a given artwork.