Can a fake Rothko make you feel something real?

In 2004, a painting attributed to Mark Rothko was sold through the prestigious New York gallery Knoedler & Co. for $8.3 million. Seven years later, it was exposed as a forgery, painted not by the celebrated American abstract expressionist but by Pei-Shen Qian, a Chinese-born artist living in Queens, New York. The case was part of a sprawling art fraud scandal that shook the American art market, raising a fundamental question: Where does the value of an artwork lie — in the object itself, or in t