Harvesting the Power of science and technology in Art authenticity : Are Indian Museums ready for it?

Harvesting the Power of science and technology in Art authenticity : Are Indian Museums ready for it?

Indian Museums - the National Museum, Indian Museum, CSMVS, Salarjung Museum, Allahabad Museum and several others spread across the length and breadth of the country - have an enviable range of collections of art and cultural objects the canvas of which spans the vast history of India. A visit to any of these museums provides a glimpse of the Indian premiership in art, architecture craftsmanship and culture. Then there are the art galleries and academies, premier among them the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi with its branches in Bangalore and Mumbai, that boast of an outstanding range of collection of contemporary and modern art.

It was not until long ago that most of these precious art collections in our museums were not adequately documented. Fortunately, with a little nudge from the Ministry of Culture, documentation has now taken a front seat and most museums have started documenting their collections. Documentation makes the collections of the museums accessible to the people, to whose collective ancestral ownership these belong, and will also help in establishing their provenance.

Unfortunately documentation has mostly been alien to our Indian culture and ethos and never been an integral part of our DNA, may be because of the historicity of our oral tradition. Improper or lack of documentation is a major concern for the safety and security of the national treasures that are in the custodianship of our museums. Documentation of all the art and cultural objects - in all its multifaceted forms including use of appropriate technologies - helps not just in provenance establishment but also in reducing the possibility of cultural illicit trafficking of the art and archeological objects. Therefore it has become incumbent on Museum professionals to adopt technological tools, that harvest the entire range of electromagnetic spectrum, to document their objects so that provenance and authenticity of these objects are very well established beyond any reasonable doubts.

Most museum professionals are privy to the whispers that roughly half of the artwork circulating on the international market is believed to be fake. The problem stems from the genesis that the current methods of authentication leave plenty of gaps in the system. Works of art disappear and then mysteriously reappear on the market. Talented forgers easily pass off fakes as the real thing. And collectors are left wondering whether the expensive works of art they acquire, even after due diligence, are actually worth the hefty price tag. According to Richard Newman, head of scientific research at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, every museum may contain artefacts that are not what they appear to be. “There are a lot of objects on display at the moment whose attributions are a little bit shaky,” he says.

It is in this backdrop that I earnestly feel that a healthy debate must start among the museum professionals in India on the use of science and technological tools in supplementing domain experts knowledge in authenticity of art objects. This is all the more relevant, particularly in modern days, when forgeries have become an inescapable problem in the art world. Unfortunately in India, most museums have continued to rely only on curators and experts knowledge (which is restricted to the physicality of what their eyes can physically see) to establish authenticity. But then even the best of experts can occasionally go wrong. No one is infallible, an aphorism advocated by Robert Jackson, Supreme Court Judge, US of A, exemplifies the possibility of the experts going wrong. Therefore relying exclusively on the experts wisdom, in art authenticity, may not necessarily be perfect and errors if any could be too costly to bear.

Multidisciplinary studies involving collaboration between art and natural sciences are helping curators archeologists and scientists to join hands in firmly establishing a cooperation between archaeology, art history and conservation-restoration on one hand and physics, chemistry and biology on the other. Within this collaboration material analysis is of increasing importance as the booming development of analytical methods has brought a great number of new instrumental microanalytical techniques with non-sampling (without taking original sample material) and in-situ applicability to an artifact. X-ray fluorescence analysis (XRF) plays a unique role in that cooperation: It can be carried out in air, in most cases the analysis is non-destructive or even non- invasive, which means that no changes or alterations occur before, during or after the investigation of an object. Miniaturisation, which has helped the electronics industry is also helping in the development of x-ray tubes as well as x-ray detectors which are just a few kilograms and below. Therefore, devices can be easily transported to an archaeological site or into museums, libraries and galleries for analytical investigations.

The technology is also helping the forgers to go to great lengths to reproduce the materials and processes of the appropriate historical period, thus increasing the possibility of error in judgment by the experts. It is here that technology can come in handy while planning an investigation. The museum curator has to identify which properties of an artifact might yield clues to its origin and this can be done using non-destructive techniques. Many familiar materials characterization techniques, in particular X-ray radiography, optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (ED-XRF), are therefore extremely useful in the museum laboratory during investigation. The surface of an object often gives an indication of how it was made. A researcher can relate this information to when and where an artifact was made, because the technical processes available to various civilizations throughout history are well documented. Manufacturing processes leave telltale marks, such as casting where there may be some 'flash' or extra metal as a result of the molten material flowing into a small gap between molds, or turning by lathe, which leaves concentric lines, as does a pottery wheel. If sheet metal was the starting material, there may still be marks from the hammer that was used to beat it into shape. Some surface details are not visible to the naked eye, so an optical microscope or SEM can be used.

Museums across the developed world have started harvesting the above mentioned technological tools in establishing art authenticity. Is it time for us in India to do so is the moot question, which the museum professionals and the Ministry of Culture must try and address. From the limited conversation that I have had with several museum professionals and few scientists from NIAS and TIFR, my experience is that most museum professionals do not fully subscribe to the idea of use of the S&T tools for establishing authenticity. They are of the opinion that experts and experts alone must be responsible for art authenticity and that technology can not substitute curators scholarship. Their apprehension is understandable but then no one is advocating that technology should replace experts opinion, rather it should only be used to supplement and aid experts. A parallel can be drawn here to the role the medical diagnostic tools play in aiding the doctors in accurate diagnosis and how effective they have been in improving health care. Have the diagnostic tools replaced the doctors? The answer is an emphatic NO and so will it be in the case of art authenticity. Science and Technology will only aid museum experts and will never replace them nor will it reduce the importance of the curators. Will the two join hands we will have to wait and see.