Art or Forgery? The Strange Case of Han Van Meegeren a videodisc for aesthetics and art history

PRESENTING AN INTERNATIONALLY NOTORIOUS AND INTRIGUING CASE STUDY in art forgery, the videodisc program Art or Forgery? The Strange Case of Han Van Meegeren is an educational tool designed to facilitate three crucial tasks in the critical study of visual art: •Access to data (a wealth of art works and information about them) •Attention to relevant detail and •Analysis of both the evidence and evidentiary issues relevant to our inter-related judgments of aesthetic value and attribution. The program provides easy access to a wealth and variety of evidence: albums of masterworks and forgeries, critical commentary, and an historic documentary film on the intensive investigations into the case and the motives and ingenuity of the alleged master forger. Besides aBookshelf of generic research material for free exploration or review, the program includes two structuredInvestigations that lead the user systematically through an assessment of the ‘Internal’ and ‘External’ evidence in the case. The videodisc won the Best Humanities Software Award in the 1990 EDUCOM/NCRIPTAL Higher Education Software Awards Program. I describe the design, uses and educational goals of the videodisc.