ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
general inquisitiveness into other peoples’ minds that theory of mind instills in us
is why all artification is in some way a performance, as the products of artification
give us a window through which we can learn about another person.
The evolutionary beginnings of artification mean that as a performance, the forger
is, as Knight puts it, “guilty of the artistic crime of misrepresenting an art performance” (2014, 46, emphasis original). The forger attempts to both gain credit from
the reputation of a renowned artist, but also damages the ability to access the work
of this renowned artist. If aesthetic attitudes towards artworks were first cultivated
around 1.7 million years ago in the evolution of aesthetic tastes by mother-infant
relationships, the Acheulean hand axe tradition and the roles in social order that the
first body decorations and decorative carvings played, one of the key psychological
bases for artification is in a communication between people. The forgery tampers
with and deliberately attempts to undermine this communication. In so doing, a
forger of an esteemed artist not only confuses our ability to connect with the esteemed artist in some deep and sublime way, but interferes with a psychological
tendency that stretches back hundreds of thousands of years, where someone feigning evolving baby interactions could have been an enemy of a parent; an individual
trying to gain credit for a hand axe or carving that was not his own creation would
have been sending a dishonest indicating signal, or, if later with the first Homo
sapiens, a trickster created art that would have had cultural and religious value to
their group, but in reality lacked a characteristic they believed the art needed, the
trickster would have been subverting the group bonding and stress-relieving reasons behind artification adaptations: if you needed to use ochre paint that everyone
else is wearing to help protect the whole group on a scouting expedition, and you
then discovered you have been supplied with different ochre, the stress-reducing
quality based on your belief would disappear. The art forgery taboo is thus an
evolved feeling that acts culturally as a taboo, just like the incest taboo is an
evolved feeling that acts in a social etiquette and ramifications found culturally
worldwide.
If Dissanayake and others are correct that artification took on its first more complicated forms in order to signal towards or express rituals and culturally important
ceremonies, and to create worlds where one could learn from fictional scenarios
and then apply this experience, gathered simulator-style, in the real world, then the
taboo around forgeries is probably also because that forgery not only confuses an
artist’s body of work. Historically back in pre-history, the purpose of the artwork
would have been weakened or destroyed completely by forgery. One might see a
modern equivalent in indigenous art in tourist economies when carvers will keep
their best art within their group for spiritual and cultural purposes, and only sell art
to foreigners that would not meet certain needs of the art culturally (e.g. Dutton
2009). For example, in worshiping a deity, only a rare material like ruby would be
considered effective inside a carving, so accidentally selling a carving with ruby
inside and keeping a carving without ruby would pervert a purpose of the artwork
culturally. Abhorrence at forgery is thus a form of evolved cheater detection that
works around an honest signal, and is similar to other evolved cheater detection
that psychologists have found in game theory (e.g. Trivers (1971), Alexander
(1987), Tooby and Cosmides (2005), Barclay and Lalumière (2006), Boehm
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