Doping Use As an Artistic Crime: On Natural Performances and Authentic Art
The problem of fakes and forgeries is central to much theorizing in philosophical aesthetics. Although artistic fakes and forgeries share many or even all of the formal characteristics of original works, it would change our aesthetic appreciation if we we
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Doping Use As an Artistic Crime: On Natural Performances and Authentic Art Andreas De Block
8.1
Introduction
Did Homerus actually exist, and if he existed, did he write the Iliad and the Odyssey? Did Shakespeare write the lion share of the works that are attributed to him, as most scholars believe? Or is there some truth in the claim of the so-called ‘antistratfordians’ that many of the poems and plays that are attributed to Shakespeare were in fact written by an anonymous, well-educated aristocrat? Questions like these keep literary historians awake, but they also seem to be of interest to the general public. Apparently, many of us care about the authorship of masterpieces, and not just about the masterpieces as such. Our caring about art authorship paves the way for art fraud. Art students and failed painters have made fortunes selling paintings they falsely attributed to old masters, and many of these forgers (among them David Stein, John Myatt, Han van Meegeren, Tom Keating and – more recently – Wolfgang Baltracchi) eventually ended up in prison for their fraudulent activities. The issue of fakes and forgeries has legal and economic aspects, but it is also central to much theorizing in philosophical aesthetics. Although artistic fakes and forgeries share many or even all of the formal characteristics of original works, it would change our aesthetic appreciation if we were to discover, for instance, that a painting is not an original Hopper, but a perfect copy of one of Hopper’s works, painted by an unknown Hungarian artist. I suspect that something quite similar explains the intuitive appeal of human nature arguments in the doping debate. This analogy entails that I agree with many athletes, sports fans and philosophers that doping use can violate the value of human nature. That said, I disagree with I would like to thank Rafael De Clercq, Arnold Burms and the editors of this volume for their inspiring comments on earlier versions of this chapter. A. De Block (*) Centre for Logic and Analytical Philosophy, KU Leuven University, Kardinaal Mercierlaan 2 – bus 3200, 3000 Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] J. Tolleneer et al. (eds.), Athletic Enhancement, Human Nature and Ethics, International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine 52, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5101-9_8, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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them about the nature of this value. The analogy with art forgery purports to show that the value that is at stake here is an aesthetic value rather than moral value. The gist of my argument will be that much in the same way that an aesthetic judgment is always and in a fundamental way a judgment of origin and performance, the observable characteristics of an athletic performance are not the only things that matter to our aesthetic appreciation of this performance. If the observable characteristics were the only things that mattered, there wouldn’t be an aesthetically relevant difference between authentic footage of an athletic performance and manip
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