Fraud and Value

Two days ago a scandal unfolded in Japan, as popular and prolific classical music genius and deaf composer Mamoru Samuragochi was revealed to be a fraud. Samuragochi, one of the Japan’s most popular musical figures, revealed that a hired ghostwriter has been writing music for him since the early 1990s.

The pieces in question include some of the most famous compositions attributed to Samuragochi, such as ‘Symphony no 1. Hiroshima,’ and ‘Sonatina for Violin.’ The ghostwriter has also come forward, alleging that Samuragochi’s deafness is also a hoax, put on by the musician to cultivate a sympathetic public persona.

The Japanese pubic, including music companies, political figures, and news outlets, are voicing their anger and disappointment with Samuragochi himself. But what does this mean for the legacy of the compositions?

The music is the same  – but without the culturally celebratory nationalist backstory provided by Samuragochi’s person, the legacy of the ghostwritten music may very well be permanently altered. The way we value art is confused, and maybe illogically based on these kinds of backstories and histories. Banksy called attention to our disorganized value systems last October, when he asked an elderly street vendor in Central Park to sell some of his authentic spray-painted canvases. Banksy’s pieces, which often sell for millions of dollars, were skimmed over by locals and tourists who assumed they were rip-offs. Banksy pointed out that the way we value art doesn’t just depend on what we see in front of us – but does that necessarily mean that we’re snobs? We clearly value the stories about human history that surround the creation of a piece of art, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That the perceived monetary value Banksy’s paintings depended so heavily on whether people think a famous artist painted them can seem unintelligible or ignorant, but we can’t help but evaluate the human experience that we see behind the artwork maybe as much as the paint and canvas.

For instance, when I know that a piece of music was calculated by a corporation, written piecemeal by five separate songwriters, and auto-tuned into existence, I evaluate it differently than a piece of music that an artist wrote and recorded alone. The processes by which we determine the value of art has a lot to do with why we think art is valuable in the first place –and while hard to untangle, this train of thought is certainly based around the enrichment and appreciation of the human experience.

Samuragochi’s scandal has me wondering – why not let our knowledge of the social schemas and time-periods, the flaws of the director, and yes, the identity of the composer – impact our views the art they produced?