单项选择题

Why, if what we value from a work of art is the aesthetic pleasure to be gained from it, is a successfully deceptive fake inferior to the real thing Conscious of this problem, some have attempted to deny the importance of authorship. The great collector and scholar Richard Payne Knight, after discovering that an antique cameo of the Roman goddess Flora might be a modem forgery, told the dealer who had sold it to him that it did not matter whether it was old or new, since its beauty was unaffected by its age. Similarly, the purchasers of a supposedly Renaissance bust of Lucrezia Donati expressed their pleasure, on discovering that it was a fake, that an artist of such talent was still alive. Indeed, in 1869 the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired the bust as an example of a forgery of exceptional quality, and at a price comparable to that paid for genuine Renaissance pieces. But it would be unwise to expect museums, dealers, or private collectors to take that attitude today.
What most of us suspect—that aesthetic appreciation is not the only engine of the art market— becomes evident when a well-known work of art is revealed as a fake. The work may not change in appearance, but it loses its value as a relic. It no longer provides a direct link to an artist of genius; it ceases to promise either spiritual refreshment to its viewer or status to its owner. Even though the work in question remains physically unaltered, our response to it is profoundly changed. In 1937 the art historian Abraham Bredius wrote of a painting entitled Christ at Emmaus, which he believed to be the work of the great seventeenth-century Dutch artist Vermeer, but which was in fact a forgery by a Dutch painter named Hans van Meegeren:
It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, on the original canvas, and without any restoration, just as it left the painter"s studio! And what a picture! ... What we have here is a—I am inclined to say—the masterpiece of Jan Vermeer of Delft. After the exposure of van Meegeren, however, it became surprisingly apparent that his forgeries were grotesquely ugly and unpleasant paintings, altogether dissimilar to Vermeer"s.
Van Meegeren"s success seemed incredible to the experts. As one reviewer noted, "had van Meegeren been a better artist... he might just have succeeded in producing "Vermeers" which would have fooled more people longer than the ones he created." Yet van Meegeren was exposed not because he ceased to fool people, but because he was forced to prove himself a forger in order to clear himself of the more serious charge of having sold a national treasure illegally.
What is extraordinary about van Meegeren"s success is that the pattern revealed by his case is commonplace. The reaction of Bredius and his numerous distinguished colleagues, far from being exceptionally foolish, was normal; fakes are often greeted with rapture by well-informed experts and by the general public alike. It is generally true that forgers are known to us only because they have revealed themselves, overcoming considerable public and scholarly skepticism to prove the works in question are theirs, only to find that what was so admired as the work of another is now seen as trite and even maladroit.
It is clear that both private and public collections must contain many works by fakers more talented and fortunate than van Meegeren. And they will continue to do so. Some will be exposed by advances in scientific techniques; but many objects cannot be scientifically dated, and even where analysis is appropriate, its conclusions must be based on a control group of "genuine" objects that may itself be contaminated.
This is the main complaint against fakes. It is not that they cheat their purchasers of money, reprehensible though that is, but that they loosen our hold on reality, deform and falsify our understanding of the past. What makes them dangerous, however, also makes them valuable. The feelings of anger and shame they arouse among those who have been deceived arc understandable, but the consequent tendency to dispose of or destroy fakes, once identified, is misguided. Even if the errors of the past only provided lessons for the future, they would be worthy of retention and study. But forgeries do more than that. As keys to understanding the changing nature of our vision of the past, as motors for the development of scholarly and scientific techniques of analysis, as subverters of aesthetic certainties, they deserve our closer attention. And as the most entertaining of monuments to the wayward talents of generations of gifted rogues, they certainly claim our reluctant admiration. The author"s reference to "private and public collections" suggests that ______.