I have recently come across an exhibition at an important Mid-West institution - The DIA exhibit on fakes, forgeries, and mysteries. I am glad the museum is allowing the visitor to play detective and really study the works in the collection to see if they can determine whether the works are genuine or fake. Sometimes visual examination of a work will inform the learned eye, but more often instrumental analysis is needed to determine the authenticity of a work of art. After all, these works have fooled scholars for hundreds of years!
I am very curious to know whether the visitor to this exhibit will feel the works of art that are not authentic are also obviously lacking in aesthetic taste. I imagine a good forger has a good aesthetic, similarly to a great artist, but perhaps the focus is just slightly different.
I have been interested in the preservation of intangible cultural heritage for quite some time and I keep up with developments in the field of intangible cultural heritage preservation through my membership in the Forum UNESCO. The United States and the United Kingdom currently have no listings on the list of masterpieces of intangible cultural heritage because the two countries have not joined the committee or ratified the declaration from UNESCO.
I attended a Christmas Pantomime while I was in Weston, England to see a work of intangible cultural heritage. Pantomime (or Panto) tells a fairy tale (in this case it was Cinderella) or another story or fable, with actors, music, and audience participation. There is always a cross-dressing element to Panto, in this case the two step-sisters were men in dressed as women, and this is never referred to as drag, but the men will be called “Panto Dames”. Often the lead male and female characters will also be played by an actor of the opposite sex as the character but who is in costume. The show was very funny, although the jokes did not often make sense to me, as all humor, like all politics, is local.
One scene fell apart when a doorknob fell off of the set and the actors all forgot their lines, but this may often happen at the Pantomime as it is somewhat free-form. The actors were all professionals and well-known as long-time characters of television shows or pop singers, which was interesting as I do not usually see very famous actors in local theater productions in America.
Pantomime is usually performed in smaller towns in England, and upon mentioning that I had attended a pantomime to an Englishman he slapped his knee, which I understand is a typical pantomime gesture. It is interesting how Pantomime is similar to some of the descriptions I have read about Commedia dell’arte and the use of gesture to convey meanings. I have read of characters slapping their knees because they find a situation funny, but I have never actually seen anyone perform that gesture in earnest. In Commedia the gestures include the use of a slapstick for similar reasons that the Panto uses knee slapping, it clues the audience that something funny or clever was said. These gestures likely originated when these performances were given in theaters or on the streets and the actors had no microphones to amplify their voices. By using a gesture that created a noise, the actor could make a visual and auditory connection with the audience to convey to them a message they may not understand from dialogue. Gesture in these performances is also important to convey a message to the audience without informing the other actors on the stage, so the audience can feel they are in on a joke about another actor, while the other actor appears unaware. The Englishman, in the act of slapping his knee, demonstrated to me an element of a piece of intangible cultural heritage. This is a cultural reference, taking an element from an artistic form and making it into a cultural form.
If art conservation is defined as the preservation of cultural heritage one needs to ask whether this preservation should or could include intangible cultural heritage as well as tangible cultural heritage.
The exercise I just performed is the analysis of a piece of intangible cultural heritage to focus on one element of the work. Similarly, when conservators write condition reports about tangible cultural heritage it is necessary to separate the objects into their elements so they can be more easily discussed in depth.
The preservation of intangible cultural heritage depends on the continued use of the heritage, which is almost completely opposite to the recommendations for the preservation of tangible cultural heritage. Art Conservation has begun a language and system of documentation that would be particularly helpful and useful for the continued preservation of intangible cultural heritage and this is an exciting frontier in the field of culture.
