Let's consider, for example, the case of a 21st c. forgery of a 19th c drawing by the artist Samuel Palmer of sheep grazing:

1. Original and copy look identical.
2. Both are created from the same materials because our 21st c forger has gone to a lot of trouble resourcing period paper and ink.
3. A comparable degree of artistic skill is exhibited in both.
4. Both are pleasing to the eye.
5. Both give pleasure.
6. In virtually every respect, then, the two art objects are identical.

My question: Why is the original worth a great deal more than the forgery?

Probably has to do with "aura" in Walter Benjamin's sense:

"Benjamin used the word "aura" to refer to the sense of awe and reverence one presumably experienced in the presence of unique works of art. According to Benjamin, this aura inheres not in the object itself but rather in external attributes such as its known line of ownership, its restricted exhibition, its publicized authenticity, or its cultural value. Aura is thus indicative of art's traditional association with primitive, feudal, or bourgeois structures of power and its further association with magic and (religious or secular) ritual."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction)

Aura or not, everything is much easier to do after someone else has shown how its done.

Columbus sailed the ocean blue
In fourteen hundred and ninety two

Can anyone name the captain who was the first to copy Columbus' feat?

The closer the copy is, the more it lacks originality.

I've heard that North Korea makes US currency that's even better than the product from the US mint.

I know that violins have several kinds of value, including collector's value. A new violin that plays as beautifully as a 400-year-old Strad is of great value to a player, but of no value to a collector.

The late Essex forger Tom Keating was always very careful before producing his "Sextons" (Cockney rhyming slang: Sexton Blake = Fake) to inscribe in indelible ink on the canvas before he began work the words THIS IS A FAKE or EVER BEEN HAD?

Any reputable Art dealer would have had the finished work X-Rayed before selling it on. This rarely seemed to happen- or so the dealers claimed. I wonder, why?

Alternatively, Keating would introduce some incongruous or anachronostic object into the finished work. One of the clients at a table in a Renoir cafe scene he painted, for example, is drinking a glass of Guinness.

Keating ended up in the dock over the same Samuel Palmer sheep drawings I mention above, but the jury acquitted him.

He became something of a TV celebrity, here in the UK. Given his own TV series, he would explain and demonstrate to the viewer the techniques of the Old Masters.

He's an interesting case of a technically very accomplished artist who never really found his own "style". But I understand that "original" Keatings- incongruous touches and all- now sell quite well on the Art market under his own name.

In 1912-1913, Piltdown gravel quarry in East Sussex yielded two skulls which were hailed immediately by British paleontologists as the long-sought evolutionary "Missing Link" between apes and man.

It took 40 years before these finds were finally exposed as a hoax: someone- probably their 'discoverer' Charles Dawson- had pieced togther a medieval human skull with the jaw of an orangutan, filed down the teeth and stained the bones with iron and manganese pigment to artificially "age" them.

The "Piltdown Man" hoax was successful because, like all good con tricks, it was built on what people wanted to believe: here was the Missing Link- and, furthermore, he was British! A short length of fossilised wood discovered near the remains was even suggestive of a primitive cricket bat.

A similar phenomenon can be found with works that were finished by a second artist. Take Mahler's 10th for example. I've heard some people say they don't like the symphony - that's fine by me.

Most people don't allow themselves to like it though because it was finished by Cooke and not by Mahler and his work may not represent (in fact it's very improbable) the artist's original intention. I never understood that. If it's great music, a great painting, a great book or whatever - what does it matter who composed/painted/wrote it?

For example, let's just assume someone finds a finished version of Kafka's 'The Castle' on his attic. Let's assume that it's great and the ending adds to the depth of the novel. Years later someone finds out that the ending was not written by Kafka himself but by an Austrian farmer called Karl Webber. My question is: so what?

You're absolutely right, Tiny, but it doesn't work that way. The Benjamin essay is really worth consulting. As far as I remember, Benjamin saw a chance in the loss of the "aura" by way of the mechanical reproduction of works of art, some liberating moment. I'll really have to reread that stuff. But this whole authorship and authenticity cult is a bit atavistic, innit?

There's now a whole sub-section of the publishing industry devoted to the production of further 'works' by once-popular dead writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Fleming and Jane Austen.

Not strictly speaking forgery, but some of the marketing devices promoting such works come pretty near to crossing the line into actual deception.

Yes but I was not specifically referring to reproduction but rather rambling about a different kind of forgery. Benjamin criticized the industrialization of the arts and I think he raised a valid point. A copy can, however, have a more valid 'aura' than the original (if you want to use that word). It's absolutely possible. It's not necessarily the case, of course, and often isn't.

Oops, sorry, Eddie. I was replying to powerpete there...

Well, Benjamin was ambiguous in his attitude, if I remember correctly.

I completely agree with you, Tiny. It shouldn't matter if that hypothetical ending to "The Castle" was by Kafka or not, but it would matter to the culture industry. Sorry if I didn't make myself clear. I'm really getting drunk, and I've moved on to Ornette Coleman's "Ornette on Tenor" (great album!) and these circumstances are conspiring against logic.

Eddie, J.D. Salinger has just won a court case against the publication of a novel by a British author starring Holden Caulfield as an old man. Fun fact.