ABSTRACT
Stories of art forgery are dependably sensational and lurid, never failing to capture news headlines. The forgery case that has garnered the most philosophical attention, however, is that of 20th-century Dutch painter Han van Meegeren and his forgeries of Johannes Vermeer’s works. Philosophical discussion of forgery has focused primarily on works of sculpture and painting because—in ordinary cases, at least—a perfect copy of a literary or musical work just is a genuine instance of that work. Philosophers have pointed at a number of wrongs to be found in forgery, which can be divided into three rough categories: Failures of integrity; harms; and violations of rights or duties. While all art forms may be equally subject to inventive forgery, the plastic arts seem uniquely (or, at least, specially) susceptible to problems of referential forgery.
