Why art attribution remains hard to master
Simon Greaves hears why technology advances will not drain the dwindling pool of art connoiseurs
The art world is facing a dearth of academically trained connoiseurs who are able to authenticate works even though no one advanced scientific method of identification and analysis is capable of proving an artwork’s origins beyond all doubt.
This is because there has been a consolidation of academic experts — a shrinking pool of expertise — while art history itself is often in a state of flux, warned Bendor Grosvenor, a leading art historian and TV presenter, who spoke of the vital and vanishing intangible skills of academic experts at a London seminar [Nov 14] hosted by the Art Loss Register at the City of London’s Apothecaries Hall.
Dr Grosvenor appealed for the informed public to be allowed to decide on the available evidence whether disputed works were authentic or not rather than for interested parties to be allowed to rely on “one thing” or method of analysis to justify a crucial decision when there was “a lot of bad science out there”. He said there was always a risk that outsourcing such decisions to a single company specialising in scientific analysis could lead “to things going horribly wrong.”
His comments came after delegates had heard from an array of companies offering clients various services to help authenticate and protect works, some taking up to four months to produce a result while one app offered an outcome in a matter of minutes. The latest contributions and limits of technology were explored by several speakers.
Kilian Anheuser, head scientist at Geneva Fine Art Analysis, explained how different customer groups were working with fine art tech labs. The main objectives were to determine whether a work was authentic or a forgery, a historic copy or heavily restored, applying the findings of technological research carried out on authentic works to the artwork in question.
From a conservation point of view past interventions and future problems were also considered. Radio-carbon dating could take two to three months, physico-chemical analysis, or technical imaging a few days to weeks, but a full report on a major artwork would take at least four months, he said.
Oliver Gravet, chief executive of LTU Tech, which supplies image matching solutions for investigators such as Interpol and the Carabinieri, outlined image recognition technologies and his company’s artificial intelligence approach to fighting art smuggling. His platform creates a visual signature for clients’ images to ease management and recognition. An image will gather multiple patterns and unique features that define its graphic DNA and produce a heat-map, forming the basis of the unique hallmark.
Loic Baboulaz, co-founder of Artmyn, described the contribution from high-resolution scans which can create a ‘digital twin’ of any work to use as reference. These enable a work to be unforgeable and for the real work’s condition to be checked against the copy over time, he said, despite reservations from some delegates about duplicating works and thus putting the originals in peril.
Carina Popovici, co-founder of art tech start-up Art Recognition, said her company was able to provide an encrypted AI report and certificate for a work. Using their technology it was possible to upload a smartphone photo and get a response on authenticity within a few days.
She said the objective of her project was to irradicate art forgeries and create a safe and transparent art market. The advantage of this system was that being data-driven it was objective and unbiased, with no human intervention.
Event organiser Julian Radcliffe, chairman of the Art Loss Register, suggested during a Q and A session that while each contributor brought expertise to the quest for truth the best approach might be to form a company consisting of the whole range of expects, historians, science and technology experts alike, the verdict of a collective of experts carrying more weight than a single expert working with an interested client, public or private.
The Art Loss Register is the largest private database of stolen and missing art, antiques and collectibles. Founded in 1990, it has identified and recovered stolen and looted items worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
