Authenticity, Accuracy, and Reliability of Artworks (DRAFT Version 2) J
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Domain 2 Authenticity, Accuracy and Reliability of Artworks: A Review of the Literature, with Some Notes about the †1 Challenges Presented by Digital Media DISCUSSION PAPER John Roeder School of Music, The University of British Columbia DRAFT version 2 September 2004 † 1For more recent discussions of the issues addressed in this paper, see: John Roeder, Philip Eppard, William Underwood and Tracey L. Lauriault, “Part Three—Authenticity, Reliability and Accuracy of Digital Records in the Artistic, Scientific and Governmental Sectors: Domain 2 Task Force Report,” in International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES) 2: Experiential, Interactive and Dynamic Records, Luciana Duranti and Randy Preston, eds. (Rome, Italy: Associazione Nazionale Archivistica Italiana, 2008). Electronic version available at http://www.interpares.org/display_file.cfm?doc=ip2_book_part_3_domain2_task_force.pdf; and John Roeder (2008), “Art and Digital Records: Paradoxes and Problems of Preservation,” Archivaria 65 (Spring): 143–155 (in press). Authenticity, Accuracy, and Reliability of Artworks (DRAFT version 2) J. Roeder Preserving artistic heritage is at least as important as it has ever been. If we cannot conceive of our own culture without the masterpieces of Shakespeare, Rembrandt and Beethoven, how can we deny our descendants the works of the artists of our own time? With the advent of the digital global village, in which new art from all over the world is instantly available, we may even wish to preserve more than our ancestors could. Ironically the very features of today’s art that make it so accessible also threaten its long- term viability (Besser 2001). Perfect copies of digital files are easily made, obscuring original contexts. Digitally expressed ideas are easy to alter and repurpose, confusing authorship. Works involving machine-human interactions defy categorization. The impermanence of electronic storage, combined with the continual obsolescence of hardware and software standards for art media, challenges efforts to establish secure, controlled, persistent repositories. The challenges can be framed concisely with reference to the concepts of authenticity and reliability. To an archivist, these words have very specific meanings. They stem from that discipline’s original concerns with business and government transactions that were recorded on durable media, following established protocols and forms, and set aside. In archival science, any document created or received in the course of an activity constitutes a record. An authentic record is a record that is what it purports to be and is free from tampering or corruption.1 To assess the authenticity of a record, in other words, one must establish its identity and its integrity (MacNeil 2000a). Essential to the identity of a record is the identification of the persons whose transactions it records; formally there are three, the author, the writer, and the addressee (the first two, or even all three may be the same entity). A record’s identity is also determined by the action in which a record participates, the relationship of the record with other records in the same aggregation, and the presence of the elements of form that records of its type should have. These elements are extrinsic, that is, determine the visual appearance of the record, or intrinsic, that is, manifest its intellectual content (Duranti 1998). A record’s integrity is revealed by the fact that it is substantially intact and uncorrupted, that is, capable of conveying the message it was meant to communicate. By identifying records, and by analyzing the social and legal contexts in which they arise, archivists arrange, preserve, and control access to them in ways that ensure their integrity, that is, protect the features of the records essential to their authenticity. Upon such preservation depends our collective memory, 1 See InterPARES 2 Terminology Database at http://www.interpares.org/ip2/ip2_terminology_db.cfm. InterPARES 2 Project, Domain 2 Page 1 of 18 Authenticity, Accuracy, and Reliability of Artworks (DRAFT version 2) J. Roeder our basis for future action. To establish the truth or historicity of the facts documented by a record, it is necessary to determine first the record’s diplomatic authenticity. But it is not sufficient, for even an authentic record may contain falsehood. Archivists use the word reliable to describe authentic records whose contents are also truthful, and consider that only a reliable record “is capable of standing for the facts to which it attests” (MacNeil 2000b, xi), that is, for “historical truth” (Duranti 1998, 81). “Proving a record’s authenticity does not make it more reliable than it was when it was created. It only warrants that the record does not result from any manipulation, substitution, or falsification occurring after it has been made or received” (Duranti and Eastwood 1995, 222). A reliable record is one that is authored by the competent person, created according to a controlled procedure, and complete in its form. Thus, record reliability is the exclusive responsibility of its creator, while record’s authenticity is the responsibility of the person maintaining it over time. For an archivist, then, it is natural to approach the challenges of preserving digital artistic works with reference to conceptions of authenticity and reliability. However, artists’ conceptions may not be the same as those developed by archivists for business and government records, because artistic works differ from them in many obvious ways. Artworks generally have little to do with “facts.” They may not be made in standard ways or according to standard forms. Many are ephemeral, constituted essentially as experiences rather than as concrete documents or objects. Especially recently, the content and form of much art depends on input from the viewer. To understand what it will take to preserve artworks, it is necessary to consider their nature, and how their creators conceive of perpetuating them. Accordingly, this essay surveys theoretical writings about several artistic media to expose the web of meanings around the concepts of authenticity and reliability. Although subjects of these theories are quite disparate, we shall see that they treat similar themes. Indeed, in theories of newer, “multimedia” works that combine previously distinct art forms, the definitions converge. Also, for certain arts, another concept, “accuracy,” links strongly to notions of authenticity. Although the discussion will eventually coalesce around artworks in digital media, we will also see that these conceptions are rooted in ideas about “analogue” media predating the computer revolution. One problem apparent in applying the archival conception of authenticity to an artwork is the assumption that every record stands for a fact or a functional (“enforceable”) act arising in the course of a practical activity (Duranti 1998, 42). For one thing, art, even representational InterPARES 2 Project, Domain 2 Page 2 of 18 Authenticity, Accuracy, and Reliability of Artworks (DRAFT version 2) J. Roeder portraiture, is rarely intended to portray objective facts.2 For another, theorists often point out that art has no practical function other than to be experienced. Concerning literature, for example: A recurrent definition uses the binary opposition functional versus non-functional: literary compositions are those with no functional application…By negative definition, the literary compositions comprise the material left once such functional communication has been excluded. However, even a composition written only to be read, with no functional daily application, has that communicative function of being read and constituting a readership. Therefore it might be better to recast the definition of literature as those compositions written with the primary function of being read.3 Although this statement finesses some fundamental questions of material (do compositions consist of letters, or words, pictograms, or any representation of speech sounds? can unwritten oral sagas be literature?) it nevertheless sets literature in clear opposition to textural documents that function practically by testifying to historical facts. Indeed Duranti (1998, 42) rules out diplomatic analysis to determine the authenticity and reliability of “documents expressing feelings and thought and created by individuals in their most private capacity, [because] the inner freedom of human beings is such that a strict observance of rules cannot be expected”—surely an apposite description of art. Keeping this dichotomy in mind, it is nevertheless the case that authenticity of many artworks involves their link to the artists’ acts, even if those acts have no “practical” value for their audience: “[A]uthenticity in all the arts involves a relation to a unique, historically positioned creative act…The authentic Night Watch is the one Rembrandt made on a definite occasion in 1642. An authentic Capriccio no. 43 is one pulled directly from a plate on which Goya toiled in 1779. So too, an authentic copy of Correspondences, or an authentic performance of the Tragic Overture, is one that is intentionally (and usually also causally) linked to particular creative activity of Baudelaire and Brahms in 1845 and 1881, respectively” (Levinson 1990, 106). The particular cases cited here, and the subtle but precise differences in the way Levinson describes them (highlighted by the underlining I have added), exemplify a classification scheme for artworks,