We are honoured to have been invited to give a presentation to the major international conference InterForensics, held this year in Brasilia, Brazil.

We are going to talk about ‘Authenticity and attribution of fine art: a perennial problem in search of an objective solution‘.

Our presentation will ask the question: How do we know if a work of art is authentic and correctly attributed? It is a challenging task, one where differences of view can easily end up in court. Often seen as the domain of one type of experts of opinion – ‘connoisseurs’ – in practice ostensibly fact-based approaches such as scientific analysis of materials and documentary evidence (‘provenance’) have long contributed alternative forms of expertise. However, this frequently raises questions of how to collectively evaluate these, such as when, say, does a stylistic judgement outweigh finding supposedly anachronistic materials? This in turn raises numerous deeper issues about such things as objectivity and reliability of the different kinds of experts in their various domains, the extent to which evidence is fact or opinion-based, and how such divergent views can be robustly evaluated against each other. Recent developments in the field show that we need to recognise that connoisseurs, art historians, provenance researchers, art conservators, and art scientists, all deliver a mixture of fact and opinion in their expertise, and that this requires formal methods of investigation to properly disentangle.

To illustrate the evolving approach to art authenticity and attribution we will look at three cases – past, present, and future. The first is the well-known Beltracchi forgery scandal (which the speaker played a key role in exposing), where fake paintings entering the market went largely unnoticed for more than 30 years until an anachronistic pigment was found; the second is an anonymised presentation of a recent case where new technologies and approaches such as material geo-chronologies and Bayesian Networks have helped to bridge gaps in an attribution problem; the third is an outline of the near future, when AI and data mining will be helping to answer authorship questions rapidly, reliably, objectively, and in an explainable manner, while drawing on the full breadth of available knowledge.

To illustrate the evolving approach to art authenticity and attribution we will look at three cases – past, present, and future. The first is the well-known Beltracchi forgery scandal (which the speaker played a key role in exposing), where fake paintings entering the market went largely unnoticed for more than 30 years until an anachronistic pigment was found; the second is an anonymised presentation of a recent case where new technologies and approaches such as material geo-chronologies and Bayesian Networks have helped to bridge gaps in an attribution problem; the third is an outline of the near future, when AI and data mining will be helping to answer authorship questions rapidly, reliably, objectively, and in an explainable manner, while drawing on the full breadth of available knowledge.