Alva Noe has an interesting essay out on art, skepticism, and forgery:

I don’t know whether it is true that a janitor at an art gallery was fired not so long ago for sweeping up the artwork the morning after the opening, but the story captures a certain skepticism about art: if art is whatever “we,” or the art cognoscenti, say it is, then there is no such thing as art.

The worry that art is a sham is an old idea and it is one that art itself has cherished.

…

It is right to reject, as Gopnik does, the myth of the connoisseur, but Gopnik does so for the wrong reasons. The problem with the myth is not that it attributes unrealistic powers of discernment and identification to the connoisseur or critic, but rather that it mischaracterizes his or her job, and so it misunderstands what powers he or she needs to do the job well in the first place.

Gopnik describes the connoisseur as if he or she were a human measuring device, someone who has been trained up to give the right answer to questions of value and origin. This thought leads directly to skepticism. For either we suppose that the connoisseur cannot be wrong, that whatever he or she says goes, or we suppose that a mistake is possible, that a different connoisseur or critic could offer a different answer—but if a mistake is possible, then we must admit that there are no settled criteria for deciding the question of value, there is only what you or I or we “like.”

The connoisseur or critic, crucially, is not a measuring instrument, a kind of authorship- or value-detector. Rather, they are bent on seeing, and seeing is not mere detection. Unlike detecting, seeing is not instantaneous, nor is it all or nothing or once and for all. Seeing is itself thoroughly critical; it is thoughtful and it is contextual. Stanley Cavell captures this idea when he explains that what distinguishes the critic is not that he or she can discern qualities that you cannot, but rather that, in discerning them, the critic can give you the means to discern them as well. Criticism is less an art of discrimination than it is a discipline of accounting for what one sees; it is a practice of making it intelligible to oneself and another. Critics make sense, and they give you the tools you need to make sense too. Critics don’t just see, they teach us how to see.

…

We are all critics, and neither the possibility of forgery, nor that of perceptual error, should lead us to be skeptics, about art, or anything else.

If you need a soundtrack for further reading and reflection, why not revisit Big Big Train on Tom Keating.