Provenance, Pedigree, Authenticity and What Matters

Image by janeb13 from Pixabay

Provenance, Pedigree, Authenticity and What Matters

By Joel Levin

Those lucky enough to visit the Museo Del Prado – the justly revered museum of Spanish and European art in central Madrid – would encounter the stunning, terrifying, but mesmerizing painting, The Colossus. It shows a giant, naked man, mostly visible above the water line, overseeing a town of fleeing and terrified people and animals, set against a stormy and foreboding sky, clenched fist in the air, with eyes shut in rage. It is a masterpiece by the great Spanish master Francisco Goya. One of Goya’s masterpieces set against or inspired by war and terror, directly or metaphorically, here the long Peninsular War (1807-1814), pitting two miserable entities, the Spanish monarchy Napoleon’s invading armies. Or is it? Did Goya paint The Colossus?

In 2008, the Prado announced the painting was not Goya’s but rather that of one of his friends, Asensio Julia. This ignited a debate about the painting’s origins, its ‘provenance’ as the art world calls it, a discussion complicated, cranky, and inconclusive: the typical life of such disputes. The evidence included topics such as whether the corner’s initials were ‘AJ,’ or ’17’, painted later as part of Goya’s art inventory. Other evidence is even less definitive.

Does it make any difference? The 20th-century philosopher, A. J. Ayer thought not, believing that such debates were nonsensical (admittedly his favorite term). The painting’s primal power remains regardless of who painted it, as does its ability to inspire awe and admiration. The visual stimulation hits our eyes and brain in the same way. The overall effect is based on the graphic portrayal’s meeting with personal experiences, direct or indirect, fear, helplessness, terror, and impending death. Besides, we never met Goya or anyone who years ago met Goya. All of this is just names drawn from a historical hat. Authorship is irrelevant in art as it is elsewhere: we pay almost no attention to the creator of the silicon chip- Jack Kilby, Robert Noyce or Kurt Lehovec, some combination of them, the bigot William Shockley, or a half a dozen others who had a hand in making it successful- and value the chip precisely the same regardless of the pedigree, the provenance, if you will, of how it came to be and through whose efforts.

Yet origins – provenance, authorship, pedigree, birth stories – weigh heavily for little reason or wrong reasons. This may be otherwise in the ephemeral world of high art, but life is not art, and it is a matter of life and death tragedy when applied to people. We are born, which we deserve neither credit nor blame, which means, if not everything, too much in the global world today. Take Steve Jobs, the iconic co-founder of Apple and the personal computer.  If Steve Jobs’ father had remained in Homs, Syria, he would (in this imaginary counterfactual) have been caught up in the Siege of Homs during the Syrian Civil War, being perhaps one of the thousands killed or tortured, or the hundreds of thousands made homeless or refugees. Would Siege Steve have become the creative billionaire who started Apple in that environment? Would he have been welcome as an Arab-Islamic-Syrian impoverished refugee in today’s America under those circumstances?

How do we distinguish between the two Steves: Real Steve and Siege Steve? Other than pedigree and origin, no other criteria exist, so pedigree and heritage it is. Is it just like a real Rolex and a fake Rolex, indistinguishable except for snobbery and status, two morally dubious categories? Do we care for and treasure Real Steve and the genuine Rolex and have disdain, but use, for the functionally helpful Siege Steve and the fake Rolex?

We might value provenance and pedigree for better reasons than snobbery (as perhaps almost any reason would be better than that): either historical connection to creativity or genius or accomplishment against imitation and a feeling of being the second rate or some claim to property rights or first to the post or priority. These two types of things might seem quite different, with the first more like art forgery and the second like illegal immigration, but they are just various aspects of the same thing.

Then, we might ask why we should attribute value to something and whether some form of authenticity or history would matter in ascertaining value. A thing might be useful: at home, a tool or device or meal, or in the workplace an office or employee or set of customers. Indeed history and authenticity can matter little in judging the utility of any of these. Consider the fake Rolex that tells time as well as the real Rolex. Are the owners of the fake impoverished in any way by owning that fake? They are certainly financially enriched $10,000-$150,000 monetarily, so that cannot be why. That would be the same with off-brand tools or chairs or food, at least if we hold non-pedigreed quality even.

Let us return to The Colossus. Between 1931 and 2008, visitors worldwide traveled to the Prado to view the oil painting, sure it was by Goya. In recent decades, that would amount to 2.5-3 million people per year, certainly over 100 million in total during that time. Did the ignorance of those visitors that Goya might or might not have been the real painter in any way impoverish them, diminish their enjoyment or pleasure, or mitigate the menacing anxiety the painting produced in their minds? How could it? We are hardly entitled to argue they failed to enjoy and be in awe of the Goya masterpiece because of their ignorance that a possible controversy would arise in the future challenging whether it was really a Goya or merely a painting in his style by his friend. Their enjoyment was just what motivated them and others to repeat visits.

But if objects’ provenance is a morally, socially, psychologically, and aesthetically empty notion, there are other, different sorts of things we do value that require a specific history. Take friendship. We might consider the two types of a fake company, one built on an untruth (I am your cousin or I am not, or I attended your college and am your fellow alumnus or I did not), and one built on a science-fiction thought experiment (your actual friend disappeared last night and an intelligent geneticist turned neurologist created a genetic duplicate with identical memories implanted in her). Do either show history, pedigree, or provenance to be of real value? Put differently, does the absence of truth or bodily continuity challenge any notion of strong friendship?

We would certainly like to think so, but what is the effect if we fail to know the historical truth? There could be none. The reasons for friendship – affection, commonality, interest, confidences, purpose, affinity, shared world view – remain, in fact by definition (ex hypothesi), precisely the same. We take the other as we find the other, and the illusion (of being a cousin or a classmate) operates as reality. Robert Nozick excitingly suggests a problem with that – he says we love the person we love uniquely such that the qualities that created that love are not any longer to be measured on the market. That is, love means being done. There is no desire to trade up: friendlier, more talented, better looking, speaks an ancient language. Thus, Nozick may think the uniqueness in the’ we’ created by love cannot be duplicated by a genetic clone or even by the imposter not possessing the appropriate pedigree. But that requires some metaphysical legerdemain of a new entity – a couple in love – apart from the two people actually in love, a metaphysical creation too difficult to justify philosophically or in the actual psychology of love observed as possessing an ever-changing degree. That degree is tested constantly, too often, in fact, given people’s willingness to credit their appetites over their obligations and families, as they constantly, to use Nozick’s term, try to trade up.

This is an issue worth considering. Two contenders for Nozick’s affections appear, original Ms. N and improved Ms. N. They are identical in features Nozick values in a mate, whatever they idiosyncratically might be, including, possibly for Prof. Nozick, a command of second-order modal and deontic logic, but improved Ms. N has slightly more of each feature. Nozick would protest he is not a baseball manager calling in from the bullpen the pitcher with a better fastball and sneakier curve, but loyal to his starter out of love. But that is not entirely convincing outside of Hollywood films and romance novels, the yearnings and fantasies of the incurably romantic, and colorized reports of the dogmatically monogamous. History and shared experiences are necessary, but if the memory of the history remains unsullied, the prior resume counts for nothing.

But what happens if the lie is uncovered: the friend (or mate) has a different history, or no past, unknowingly conceived in a Frankensteinian cloning lab the day before? Is it the fact of the lie or its discovery that presents a problem? First, let us distinguish two general types of untruth. On one side is the unintentional, negligent or mistaken, the relatively innocent. On the other is the intentional or fraudulent, the relatively pernicious. Ancient cultures often fail to acknowledge that distinction, saying wrong is wrong, allowing, for example, the distraction of Oedipus who mistakenly kills a man who turns out to be his father and who marries a woman who, again remarkably, turns out to be his mother, but we root modern law and morality in the critical inclusion of that distinction. For tribal and for smaller societies, and again too often with authoritarian modern societies, Sophocles’ notion in Oedipus that being mistaken is equivalent to being culpable has reigned. We, for various reasons, do not think that, or at least do not think that when we think clearly, and moreover find culpability a matter of intentional degree, from negligence to recklessness to harming to the murderous.

So, small misconduct is dealt with in the way it is in all of ordinary life, with accommodation, adjustment, and restitution. What, then, of larger misrepresentations, serious lies? If authenticity is all in a relationship – I only married you because I wanted to marry an Ivy League female – then, of course, unless a mistake is evident (I thought Ivy League was a description, not a proper name and certain smaller colleges like Williams or prestigious technical universities like MIT qualify – by definition, it would necessarily count if there is a misstep, but not count much, as we normally find inadvertence, mistake, and even neglect to be small matters. If it is in fact a lie, then it matters a great deal more (although reasons that offer excuses or mitigation – I was forced, I didn’t think she would find out or it would hurt her – still count – but that is because of the deception or misleading conduct itself, not the alteration in historical circumstances. Ivy envy may seem far-fetched, although the struggle for status and prestige, even borrowed, suggests otherwise. However, valuing membership in certain groups who possess supposedly attractive qualities in the realms of race or religion or nationality is present everywhere. That said, the mistake is to matters unimportant, and we treat small things as small, and authenticity, here as in the moral and social aspects of painting, as a small thing.

What then, finally, come of people and their original history? We have millions of Dreamers in America, and similar individuals everywhere: Turks in Germany, Pakistanis in the UAE, the children of offspring fleeing violence in Myanmar, East Africa, the Middle East and Central America, and that, unfortunately, is just a start. Children who arrive in a new country can be indistinguishable in any morally or socially or psychological way from those born in that country. Yet education, medicine, services, entitlement and opportunities are withheld from them, voting and employment severely restricted, and their ability to remain, perhaps for the rest of their lives, is often in constant jeopardy, if not under immediate threat. One recalls that in America, before the Dreamers, were the victims of Japanese Internment and those of Operation Wetback, where President Eisenhower bused and then abandoned over 100,000 deportees into the Mexican desert in 112° heat, killing untold numbers.

The notion of entitlement to a particular territory is hardly new.  A quick tour through classical texts (the more recent literature is no better, just bloodier as killing technology – guns, tanks, planes, bombs – has improved) reveals ancient wars, slavery based on national origins, limited citizenship (let alone equality) rights, and ongoing battles as to land, crops, sacred sites and civil rights all show just how long we have been worried about who belongs. One might consider, at a single point in time, that point in the intersection of ancient Arab, medieval Ottoman, and modern British cultures, in the famous scene from Robert Bolt’s Lawrence of Arabia, where the momentary use of a desert well for drinking water by a member of the Hazimi of the Beni Salem tribe, when the ownership of that well was claimed by the Harith (Omar Sharif with a rifle) presents a simple and unremorseful license by the Harith to murder the wrongful (Hazimi) taker of the water. Sharif shot a thirsty man in a scorching desert for drinking from a pail drawn from the wrong well.

Yet, over time, almost every place finds the original combatants to have merged only to be replaced by new ones, with the sources and reasons for differences between the former enemies long forgotten. Exclusion, deprivation, and murder: all for nothing. The Persia that saw endless wars among the Airyas, Dahis, Seinus, Sairinas, Tuiryes, Scythian, Hamaxobis, and Sarmatians now only fights Israel, Saudis and the West; while the belligerent tribes of Britain, including the Atribates, Belgae, Parsisi,, or the later Celts themselves split – Eastern, Cisalpine, Lepotine, Hispano, and Insular – constantly at each other’s throats, Romans, Anglos, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes are unrecognizably merged, ready to Brexit and defend the West. Tribal and national memberships are fleeting, controversial, and typically based on that history, misapprehensions and mistakes.

If friendship is the only place for pedigree that may matter, if there it seems tied by a single thread and is largely inconsequential, then the pedigree of origins is like the provenance of art: culturally interesting but morally insignificant. For later generations of inhabitants – Dreamers, Americans of Japanese heritage, offspring of immigrants everywhere – even the thread, based on its tenuousness to representations intentionally or accidentally unmet, is broken. How can pedigree matter at all in such circumstances?

The last resort here is to the notion of metaphysical or religious essentialism. Essentialism – a large topic rooted in the writings of Plato, is a matter for another (hopefully distant) day – here can be taken to mean that everything (entity, person, place, bacteria, almost any noun) must have certain qualities for it to be what it is. Being American would then mean one would have some essential American qualities (citizenship perhaps) as would The Colossus (including arguably being painted by Goya) or being a triangle (less controversially being a three sided polygon). Two immediate problems (at least) arise: who decides what is essential and is it an all-or-nothing issue.

First, who decides. Were Native Americans and black slaves Americans before enactment of the 14th Amendment in 1868, as they were certainly by no means citizens? As to the second problem: almost everything is a matter of degree, not essentialness: being tall or bald or skilled comes in degrees. That would implicate being American, as one’s qualities for membership are complex and controversial: having dual citizenship, being naturalized, being born abroad of an American parent, born here but of non-citizen parents or born on an American army base abroad, serving in a foreign army, failing a largely meaningless citizenship test few native-born could pass or being cognitively unable to take it, to mention just a few of the issues. But then why should we think that someone is one thing or another rather than a hybrid? How critical can pedigree be if it is a matter of degree, often both minor and controversial at that, with ambiguities weighing for and against, and using criteria that shift, are difficult to measure, and can even be contradictory?

What, then, should we think when we think of origins, where our art and our institutions and our ancestors and our fellow human beings came from? As matters of cultural history, ethnic pride, political lessons, economic precedents, or understandings of the great sweep of human evolution, development, socialization, achievement, and history, such focuses and concerns about origins are more than interesting: they can be both useful and awe-inspiring. They offer insights on what happened and wonder about what didn’t but might have. Morally, however, caution at every point is necessary. Origins are explanations, not justifications; causes of the way things have been, not reasons to continue that way; insights into how we have separated the world to make sense of it, not occasions to divide that world going forward.

I want to suggest two observations, both borrowed, one from the English zoologist, Richard Dawkins, in evolutionary biology, the other from Immanuel Kant in philosophy. Dawkins suggests that the things that we uniquely see as ourselves – our bodies, our personhoods, our very identity – are not in some sense really us at all, but a large, sometimes clumsy and awkward, sometimes adept and brilliant formation that the biological and chemical logic of genes through their complex organic network – the molecular biology of DNA, RNA, and proteins – put us together so that they can survive. The genes, not we, reach for immortality. That is, it is the selfish gene operating through the complex laws of evolutionary biology that makes sure that we remain healthy, safe, warm and nourished, so that we can reproduce and allow that very genetic material to continue and exist in the future. That material regularly reproduces with mutations, if unpredictably, at least often enough to ensure that genetic variation and specie change occur. This means that our distant offspring eventually be as unrecognizable to us as we are to our ancestors the blue-green algae (prokaryotes). Given that, why does pedigree matter?

The other insight is that of the 18th century German thinker, Immanuel Kant. (It is worth pausing a moment here to remember that Kant, revered as the giant of German thought, famously never left his treasured German home city of Koenigsberg. Today, that city is called Kaliningrad, lies inside Russia, and Kant and his neighbors would be Russian, not German, citizens). We need to take a minute to recall where we are. The problem originally was how much does pedigree in art, the concept of provenance, make any difference in the aesthetics of the painting, in its enjoyment by others, its presentation to the world, or in any other way that matters other than the fact that its representation or perhaps misrepresentation of the world is being something other than what people think it is? Upon brief reflection, and there is no more than that here, it does not appear that there is any very good reason to elevate it beyond that. Should our place in the world as individuals, or at least as we look at the political world with boundaries and borders, consecrated places and restricted places, inclusion for some and exclusion for others be based on pedigree no different than paintings’ claims based on provenance? We are born in particular places under particular circumstances that are not credit worthy or meritorious to us, they are just matters of chance. Our ability and tendency to bond, unite, array, and collectivize, or to fray, war, disarray, and fracture are well-known: they are, in fact, the stuff of history. But should that count in any way as essential? We have rejected essentialism at the individual level and we might well consider how dysfunctional it is as a uniting force, not because it fails, but because it succeeds. All sorts of terrible and destructive nations and governments seem to have endless people united behind them. The world wars, with tens of millions of combatant deaths and even more civilian ones, offer ample proof of that.

Kant’s insight then: Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. We don’t need purity – pedigree or provenance – and it rarely arrives anyway. The crooked timber of the individuals in a society does not lead to a straight design. We need to give it up, embrace the complexity and the imperfections, worry about the Siege Steve Jobs being lost at any moment and revel in the disheveled havoc. In fact, to return to Goya and The Colossus, the power of art exceeds the power of photo exactly because it is made of crooked timber. The creatively imperfect reveals more than the stark mirror. We need to put away what we think we learn from group membership, first across the border, and the purity of the creation of those we now claim as our ancestors, as almost all of it is pretension and prejudice. Once those, and the accompanying snobbery and pride, along with the notion of historical purity, are excluded, the moral and the creative become greater possibilities.