Chiapas Tote Bag

Philosophers sometimes discuss cases of forgery and appropriation in art as similar but contrasting examples to understand issues relevant to the artistic value of artworks (Irvin 2005, Hick 2010). Something interesting about these cases is that both in forgeries and in ‘appropriation art’, we find works that can look very similar, and yet, deserve different value judgements or are actually evaluated differently. Moreover, despite the similarity of the cases, the philosophical analysis of what justifies different evaluations in the case of forgeries and appropriation art provides different conclusions in each case. I propose a third contrasting example: a case of cultural (mis)appropriation exemplified by what I will call the Chiapas tote bag and a questionably fancier doppelgänger.