“If a fake is good enough to fool experts, then it’s good enough to give the rest of us pleasure, even insight,” the art critic Blake Gopnik wrote in an essay, “In Praise of Art Forgeries,” in the Times last Sunday. It’s a cute argument that I reject, but which gets me thinking. Gopnik’s hook is a scad of forged Pollocks, Rothkos, and other big-name abstract paintings, sold by New York’s venerable Knoedler & Company gallery for many millions of dollars over two decades, until 2011. Exposed, the affair ended Knoedler’s hundred and sixty-five years in business. (Lawsuits creep forward.) Among the marks was the late, august Swiss collector Ernst Beyeler, who, in 2005, called his bogus Rothko “a sublime unknown masterwork.” Wonders Gopnik, “Why not think of that picture as the sublime masterwork that Rothko happened not to have gotten around to?”

Well, because it’s not a “work” at all but a pastiche whose one and only intention is to deceive. Its maker—reportedly, a guy in a garage on Long Island—wasn’t concerned with emulating the historical Rothko but, instead, with mirroring the taste of present-day Rothko fanciers. Fakes are contemporary portraits of past styles. No great talent is required, just a modicum of handiness and some art-critical acuity. A forger needn’t master the original artist’s skill, only the look of it. Indeed, especially in a freewheeling mode like Abstract Expressionism, a bit of awkwardness, incidental to the branded appearance, may impress a smitten chump as a marker of sincerity—even as something new and endearing about a beloved master.

Time destroys fakes by revealing features of the era—the climate of taste—in which they were made. “Forgeries must be served hot,” said the art historian Max Friedländer. I’ve seen two “Vermeers” that were painted in the nineteen-twenties by the king of modern forgers, the Dutchman Han van Meegeren (1889-1947), and which hung unchallenged, for decades, in the National Gallery, in Washington, D.C. They are ridiculous. Among other blinking signs of fraudulence, there’s an interesting suggestion that the likes of flappers and Greta Garbo inhabited seventeenth-century Delft.

How could anyone ever, for a minute, have mistaken those howlers for Vermeers? That’s easy. Connoisseurs are products of their times as much as anyone else, subject to the same unexamined assumptions. But it’s usually a connoisseur who soonest smells a rat. He or she does so not by being wary but by becoming puzzled in a normal pursuit of pleasure.

Believing is seeing.

What do we see when we look at a painting? Decisions. Stroke by stroke, the painter did something rather than something else, a sequence of choices that add up to a general effect. If you’re like me—and, yes, I count myself a middling connoisseur—you register the effect and then investigate how it was achieved; walking the cat back, as they say in espionage. As a trick, ask yourself, of details in a painting, something like, “Why would I have done that in that way?” The aim is to enter into the mind, and the heart, of the creator. Attaining it entails trust, like that of a child attending a fairy tale.

Looking with this kind of absorption won’t immunize you to falling for a fake, but you are apt to be confused by false notes if the supposed artist’s style is familiar to you. The game then deepens. The forger hopes that, because you’re credulous, you will revise your estimation of the artist to accommodate the surprises. Or consider a reverse case: you’re told that an authentic work is a forgery. Paranoically, you view everything in it as sham. Again you’re bewildered, this time thrown into doubt about your powers of perception. You conclude that you’re a hopeless sucker.

To judge a work of art involves self-surrender.

You are something other than your own person when in art’s spell. If you dread being made a fool of, you will steer clear of art altogether. But risking foolishness, and succumbing to it occasionally, builds up antibodies of wisdom. You become a harder target—while remaining a target, being eagerly persuadable—for flimflam. Art forgery fascinates because it excites the same susceptibilities that art does. The sanest response to having been fooled, once the chagrin wears off, is gratitude for a lesson that you won’t forget.

So there may be an “insight” that Gopnik finds in fakes. The possible pleasure eludes me, except as akin to the good time you thought you were having on the night before you woke up with a mother of hangovers.

Above: Mark Rothko’s untitled canvas at the Sotheby’s showroom on New Bond Street, in central London. April, 2010. Photograph by John Stillwell/PA Wire/AP.