I recall a lecture, early in my college career, in a required distribution course on the history of Dutch art, in a hall full of students from other majors. We had finally gotten to Vermeer, a great relief after the difficult-to-distinguish Cuyps and Ter Horsts, Ruisdaels and Ruysdaels, Van de Veldes and Van de Veldes (unless there was a cow; then it was definitely Paulus Potter). This day the professor, the great Seymour Slive, opened his talk by projecting Han van Meegeren’s "The Supper at Emmaus" and saying, "So here’s a somewhat interesting Vermeer."

We laughed. All of us. Everyone laughed, without knowing the joke, only knowing that whatever that thing was, it wasn’t a Vermeer. Nineteen years old, math and biology and history majors, we all knew that that wasn’t Vermeer. We liked Vermeer, and the painting on the screen was stupid. "You can all see it," Slive said, unsurprised. "Even you can see it." (Even us.) "And yet for a long time, nobody could see it." For years — until Van Meegeren stood up in court and painted one to prove it — Dutch art experts insisted that his forgeries were Vermeers. They had lots of good reasons to say so. The paintings weren’t necessarily taken as very good Vermeers, but in the experts’ eyes, they were plainly his.

View Slideshow: On Getting the Names Right

The critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote, in a 2008 New Yorker article, of the Van Meegeren Vermeers: "The specter of forgery chills the receptiveness — the will to believe — without which the experience of art cannot occur. Faith in authorship matters. We read the qualities of a work as the forthright decision of a particular mind." With due respect to a man who has experienced vastly more visual art than I have, it seems to me that Schjeldahl is simply wrong, or is right only as long as we are considering the content and story of an entire body of work. The experience of the individual work, separated from the body, is the same whether anonymous, onymous, or misattributed. We don’t need to recognize that "a particular mind" is at work; any mind will do. Our pleasure in the work may be enriched by what we think we know of its artist, by how we imagine it fits into the story of his development, but those are inevitably speculative and subsequent to the pleasure of the qualities on display. We are also, often enough, just wrong about what we think we know of biography and development. Perhaps we are wrong because we are fooled by a forger, but that’s the extreme. More often we are wrong because biographies and monographs are efforts to reconstruct what is permanently hidden, best guesses with footnotes.

"Who painted it?" must come after "What is it?" and "Do I like it?" Otherwise a museum need not bother to hang much except title cards. The natural questions — who made it? when? where? why? how? — interest me too in painting, music, and literature, but the actual insinuating unpleasantness of forgery is that it reveals, perfectly, when we have used the answers to those (relatively trivial) questions to answer the far more important question of "Do I like it?" Forgery provides exactly the same uncomfortable sensation as the new airport security scanners: It sees right through to your pretension.

Van Meegeren’s "Emmaus" plummeted in financial value the instant it was reattributed. Its historical value was reassigned. Its explanatory value shifted, from illustrating the "young" Vermeer to illustrating something seedier. But its aesthetic value was unchanged and is unchanged to this day: If you liked it before, you should like it just as much after. If you loathed it before, you can keep loathing it, especially if you said so back when it was still a Vermeer. The problem is that we use the same word, value, for two radically different meanings. A painting’s value on the art market and its value to a given viewer are — unfortunately but unsurprisingly — far apart. In the case of revealed forgery, the fall of one value is so extreme that its pull on the other value seems irresistible. Did Rembrandt’s "Man with the Golden Helmet" begin to blur when you learned it wasn’t Rembrandt’s? Probably not much. Van Meegeren’s "Emmaus" took a far steeper plunge, resulting in a widespread rejection of its aesthetic value until, it seems, no one could take it seriously as art, as a picture at all, even people who had never seen it, even students in 1987 who had never heard of Van Meegeren. Somehow, at first glance we knew it was valueless, in both respects.

And yet I am just like everyone else: I find it hard not to care about the name. A few months ago I went to a reading by the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. I bought his book and dutifully, pointlessly, went to the front table to have him sign it for me. As I was doing so, I asked him, "Why do we want authors to sign their books for us?" I was truly baffled, and I am an author who has blindly defaced or personally inscribed thousands of title pages. This wise explicator of the human soul’s hidden triggers and wiring replied, "I haven’t the faintest idea."

"On Getting the Names Right" originally appeared in the April 2011 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' April 2011 Table of Contents.