ABSTRACT
Forgeries, copies and variations encompass a whole range of interesting problems within the arts. A forger of paintings can do one of two things. First, he or she could forge an existing painting and attempt to pass it off as that particular painting. Second, he or she could produce a painting and attempt, fraudulently, to pass it off as being by someone else. The first kind of forgery is wrong because it is deceitful. Gerhard Richter's Dead 2, is a copy, albeit of a complex kind. The "super Xerox machine" will make an atom-for-atom replica of an existing work of art. The salient fact about Richter's cycle of paintings is the relation they bear to photographs. The question on which the chapter focuses is why Richter based his painting on a photograph; that is, the objective behind painting an image that already exists in another medium.
