Seminari impartit per: Catelijne Coopmans, Linköping University, Sweden

Skillful forgers can mimic the appearance of original works of art very closely; reports of forgeries that fetched high prices at auction, were exhibited in reputed museums, or otherwise slipped through the net, suggest as much. And yet, accounts of art forgery also often emphasize that even the most skillful imitations fall short of the mark in some way (and that what looked convincing and consistent with an artist’s style at one time, no longer does at another). The question of how to pick up relevant differences in works that have been created to pass for similar, poses interesting questions regarding what counts as evidence and expertise. In this talk I focus on how such questions are played out in the public domain. Drawing on (auto)biographies of fakers and authenticators, investigative reports, exhibition catalogues and other public sources, mostly from European and North American contexts in the 20^th and 21^st century, I focus on the way experts instruct their publics in both the possibilities and the difficulties of knowing an artwork for what it is. These instructions, I argue, are worth attending not only for the various ways in which they establish “truth” as “out-able”, but also for how they distribute responsibility for outing it.

Bio:

Catelijne Coopmans is a Research Fellow in the Department of Thematic Studies, Technology and Social Change (TEMAT), at Linköping University, Sweden. Her research interests include visual evidence, visual demonstrations, and dynamics of expertise and sense-making in areas such as medical diagnostics, business data visualization, and art authentication. She received her D.Phil. in Management Studies, with a specialization in Science and Technology Studies, from the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, in 2006. Among her publications are the co-edited volume Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited (MIT Press, 2014), and the co-authored paper ‘Eyeballing Expertise’, with Graham Button, which was given the Distinguished Paper Award by the American Sociological Association, Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis section in 2016. Catelijne is a Collaborating Editor at Social Studies of Science, and a member of the editorial board of the East Asian Science, Technology and Society (EASTS) Journal. A Dutch citizen, she recently returned to Europe after spending nearly ten years at the National University of Singapore. Based in Girona while making regular trips to Sweden, she works part-time as an academic researcher and part-time in private practice as a life/career coach for academics.