I recently read an article about the German art forger, Wolfgang Beltracchi, who produced paintings in the style of well-known artists and sold them as originals, making a fortune until he slipped up. Now, according to the interview, he sells paintings under his own name for hefty prices. It got me wondering. Suppose Beltracchi, undoubtedly a talented and skillful painter, as well as an intelligent analyst of the styles of other painters, instead of forging the signatures of other artists, had produced paintings by Beltracchi in the style of X? Would anyone have bought them?
A counter-example is that of the Israeli composer, Elam Rotem, an expert musicologist and performer of baroque music. He has written several brilliant works in baroque style, with Hebrew texts, which, in my opinion, raise puzzling issues. Does their acknowledged excellence depend on their fidelity to eighteenth-century norms? Suppose another musicologist, expert in the baroque period, found an inconsistency in Rotem's twenty-first century compositions, something that no baroque composer would have done? Would that disqualify Rotem's work?
On the other hand, suppose a genuine eighteenth-century manuscript by a known composer of the era, suddenly turned up, containing departures from the idiom of his time, harmonies, let's say, or rhythmic figures, that don't fit into our understanding of baroque music? Such a discovery would force musicologists to modify their understanding of the baroque style.
Rotem's works stand on their musical quality, their interest, their ability to move the listener. They are not banal exercises in the baroque style. Recently, for about a month I was working on the the first violin part, arranged for flute, of Bach's double concerto in D Minor, a splendid work, too difficult for me. The challenge of learning Bach's music, even though I couldn't play it adequately, was valuable. As I worked on it, I kept wondering how Bach did it. Why are the sequences of notes that he wrote so deep and moving?
To take a rest from Bach and play something closer to within my reach, I've started working on some pleasant Kuhlau duets for two flutes, and the more I play it, the less I find in them. I wouldn't have the temerity to call the music banal, but does anyone mention Kuhlau and Bach in the same breath?
Getting back to Beltracchi, the paintings he did in the style of artists who were well-known, but not among the pioneering geniuses of twentieth-century art (at least so I gathered from the article), would probably have been considered banal if he had signed them in his own name. When they were taken to be authentic works, their value depended on the solid achievements of the painters they were attributed to.
