It can take your breath away, looking at a painting by a renaissance master. Would the inhalation be a little less sharp if you knew the painting was a forgery? A good forgery?
Historian Lydia Pyne forces us to consider such questions in her book Genuine Fakes: How Phony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff. She provides examples from laboratory-made diamonds to jelly beans with bacon flavor.
Do we appreciate the synthetic as much as the authentic? That is one question for our discussion with the author.