Photo courtesy of Thomas Ricker via Wikipedia Commons
By Lily Benn ʼ24
Staff Writer
Have you ever been to a museum and thought about how easily someone could recreate some of the featured art? It may not be as easy as you think. Origify, a technology originally used for spare car part product authentication, has now been adapted to identify potential counterfeit art pieces, The Guardian reported.
According to ArtNet, the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany, fell victim to a counterfeit art con artist between the years of 2016 and 2018. A former employee admitted to stealing original works of art by Franz Stuck, Franz von Defregger and Eduard von Grützner and replacing them with counterfeit replicas. ArtNet explained that this man then went on to sell the highly famous works of art at auctions and kept the large sums of money for himself.
According to Mount Holyoke College Associate Professor of Art History Jessica Maier, con artists presenting counterfeit art as real historical or famous art has been a phenomenon ever since a market for art emerged. Maier elaborated with the example of Han van Meegeren in the early 20th century. This infamous case, she explained, involved plagiarism and forgery of the work of Johannes Vermeer, who is most known for his 1665 painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring.”
According to an article from ISP, the Origify technology would create a unique digital imprint for each piece it uploads. This imprint is composed of microscopic attributes that are unique to the original subject. In this case, the features of the original artworks could be the pigments, texture, brushstrokes and other components that are more difficult to discern with the naked eye, the article explained.
Origify was developed under Bosch, a large German manufacturing company, The Guardian reported. Its technology only works when a piece of art is registered in Origify’s database. As Origify’s inventor Oliver Steinbis has explained, it is not possible for an image that is not registered in their system to be identified as an original.
Maier explained that this technique of counterfeit detection has some flaws. When fakes of famous or historical art pieces come into museums, the route they take often does not line up with how the Origify technology would identify it, she said. The counterfeit art piece would likely not be detected until it was accepted into a museum or already in it. Maier continued, “You're not actually saying this is by Vermeer; you're just saying this is, in fact, the painting that we fingerprinted, whereas it could have come into the museum at an earlier date as a fake.”
According to Maier, this would defeat the purpose of the Origify technology, as it would already have the counterfeit art piece registered as real in its database. She framed the Origify technology as, at its best, one tool in a toolbox of other detection techniques that museums and art experts have created over centuries.
“A lot of other tools are more tried and true," Maier said, emphasizing the importance of human eyes, expertise and provenance as established and successful techniques used in the Meegeren and Vermeer example. “The more unbroken that paper trail, the better, because it documents a life for that object,” she elaborated. The recent example of the false paintings in the Deutsches Museum that inspired the adaptation of Origify to identify counterfeit art is a very uncommon forgery technique, she explained.
Origify, though used for other markets such as spare car parts and product authentication, is not yet in full use for counterfeit art detection, according to The Guardian. Michael Daley, the director of ArtWatch U.K., explained that Origify and new technologies like it seem useful due to their ability to detect forgery in other markets.
According to ISP, Origify is not publically available for art authentication purposes, but it continues to be used for product authentication.