{"id":4658,"date":"2014-02-08T19:10:05","date_gmt":"2014-02-08T23:10:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arts.umich.edu\/ink\/?p=4658"},"modified":"2014-02-08T19:10:05","modified_gmt":"2014-02-08T23:10:05","slug":"fraud-and-value","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/2014\/02\/08\/fraud-and-value\/","title":{"rendered":"Fraud and Value"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most popular musical figures, revealed that a hired ghostwriter has been writing music for him since the early 1990s<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The pieces in question include some of the most famous compositions attributed to Samuragochi, such as \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcSymphony no 1. Hiroshima,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcSonatina for Violin.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 The ghostwriter has also come forward, alleging that Samuragochi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s deafness is also a hoax, put on by the musician to cultivate a sympathetic public persona.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

The music is the same<\/a> \u00c2\u00a0\u00e2\u20ac\u201c but without the culturally celebratory nationalist backstory provided by Samuragochi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pieces, which often sell for millions of dollars<\/a>,\u00c2\u00a0were skimmed over by locals and tourists who assumed they were rip-offs. Banksy pointed out that the way we value art doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just depend on what we see in front of us \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but does that necessarily mean that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re snobs? We clearly value the stories about human history that surround the creation of a piece of art, and that isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t necessarily a bad thing. That the perceived monetary value Banksy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s paintings depended so heavily on whether people think a famous artist painted them can seem unintelligible or ignorant, but we can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t help but evaluate the human experience that we see behind the artwork maybe as much as the paint and canvas.<\/p>\n

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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201cand while hard to untangle, this train of thought is certainly based around the enrichment and appreciation of the human experience.<\/p>\n

Samuragochi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s scandal has me wondering – why not let our knowledge of the social schemas and time-periods<\/a>, the flaws of the director<\/a>, and yes, the identity of the composer \u00e2\u20ac\u201c impact our views the art they produced?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most popular musical figures, revealed that a hired ghostwriter has been writing music for him since the early 1990s. The pieces in question include […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":205,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4658"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/205"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4658"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4659,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4658\/revisions\/4659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}