My Piece of the Internet

Forgery: where art and crime intersect.

Not all kinds of forgery are art, of course. When my fourteen-year-old self forged my father's signature on my practice records to assure my band director that yes, of course I practiced at home as much as I was supposed to, there was no art involved there. (Rather the opposite, in fact.) I suppose you could argue that mimicking someone's handwriting is calligraphic forgery, but that feels to me like it's stretching the point. Counterfeiting we've already talked about separately, in the first year of this Patreon; the manufacture of fake IDs or other legal documents, or of something like knockoff Gucci purses, are also not the focus of this essay.

No, here we're concerned with the creation of fake objects of art, whether works attributed to a specific artist, or anonymous artifacts of a particular place and time. And this is a topic I find fascinatingly squirrelly.

The techniques necessary to pull this off have gotten increasingly sophisticated over time. Back in the day -- or even now, if you're selling to a credulous enough fool -- anything that passed muster to a casual glance might suffice. Get yourself a fresh sheet of parchment, papyrus, or paper, write or draw on it, apply some physical and chemical stresses to make it look old, and you're good to go. Fire a pot or clay figure, or carve something out of stone, then batter it around for that authentic chipped look. Maybe even stamp out an ancient coin or two, if it's a piece rare enough to be worth substantially more than its metal content.

These days, it's not nearly that simple. We have carbon dating, spectroscopic analysis, and other high-tech methods of determining whether some detail is out of place. Which doesn't mean forgeries have gone away; it just means that talented forger needs to know a lot more than just what their proposed artifact should look like. There's a thriving market in blank fragments of ancient papyrus -- so the substrate will pass an age check even if what's written on it is new -- and who knows what texts have been scraped off bits of parchment, what paintings have been covered or rubbed away, so something more lucrative can be put in their place. The best forgers need to know the chemistry of inks and paints, how to make the right tools, the techniques used back then, so that only the closest analysis by the most skilled experts can spot the fake.

Nor is it only about the object itself. These days, we also pay a lot of attention to provenance: the history of an object's ownership, which can help to prove that it wasn't made last week. (A very similar term, provenience, is used in archaeology to refer to where the object was found: relevant to sifting out illegally looted objects from those excavated under legitimate conditions.) Of course, if you want to pass off a fake as the real thing, you also have to forge a provenance -- hence the massive upswing after World War II in items that had been the property of an "anonymous Swiss collector," a fig leaf to cover Nazi theft and forgeries alike.

That's when you're just trying to make a Twelfth Dynasty Egyptian ushabti or a bronze ornament from Sanxingdui: a plausible example of a type, but nothing more specific than that. When you're trying to pass something off as a previously-unidentified Picasso or Rodin, then you can't hide behind the expected variations between different nameless historical artisans; you have to mimic not just the materials but the ideas, composition, and execution of that specific person -- well enough that it seems like it could have genuinely been their work.

And at that point, you very nearly have a Zen koan on your hands: if someone forges a Rembrandt so well it can't be told from the real thing, is there a meaningful difference? Is the art itself what's worthwhile, or the fact that it was made by a specific person?

The answer to that really depends on context. If I'm a layperson who likes Caravaggio's style of painting, and somebody else comes along who paints just like Caravaggio (without claiming those are his works), I might be delighted to acquire things of the exact type I like for a fraction of the cost. Yay for pretty art! By contrast, if a forger lies to me and I pay Caravaggio prices for something that doesn't suffer from the scarcity of the artist being dead for centuries, I'm probably going to be pissed. And if I'm an art historian trying to learn more about Caravaggio, that forger has actively poisoned the well of scholarship by introducing false data.

Some of our "forgery" problems now actual stem from situations more like that first example. You can buy a million and one plastic replicas of Michaelangelo's David in Florence, and nobody thinks of those as forgeries . . . but rewind a few centuries or millennia, and those replicas had to be hand-crafted out of marble or bronze or whatever suited the sculpture being copied. That wasn't forgery; it was just how art got replicated, and the best copyists were deploying a useful, legitimate skill. The same was true of paintings. Now, however, the interests of both scholarship and the aura of owning a verified-as-legitimate original mean we have to sort that historical wheat from the chaff.

Or take the workshop context in which many Renaissance artists operated. Apprentices were expected to mimic their master's style, and if the result was good enough, the master was free to sell those works under his (or, more rarely, her) own name. Again, nowadays we strive to separate those out from the authentic works of the master -- but that reflects a modern attitude where the individual genius is the most important thing, above whether it reflects their style or was made under their auspices.

Some forgeries are extremely famous. Han Van Meegeren had to out himself as a forger when he was accused of collaboration for selling a Vermeer to the Nazi Hermann Göring; to prove that he hadn't hocked a piece of cultural patrimony, he painted another one while court-appointed witnesses stood and watched. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has spent quite a bit of money trying to prove the disputed authenticity of a kouros (a specific style of statue) they bought for seven million dollars, but the best they've been able to achieve is a label identifying it as "Greek, about 530 B.C., or modern forgery." The Boston Museum of Fine Arts similarly clings to the hope that their probably-fake "Minoan snake goddess" statuette might be the real thing.

One thing these forgeries have in common: the demand for the genuine article is high enough to make fakes worth the effort of their creation. Minoan snake goddesses got manufactured because Sir Arthur Evans' excavations at Knossos attracted a ton of publicity, and he was not particularly discriminating in buying the "discoveries" people brought to him. Few criminals bothered forging Indigenous art until collectors turned their attention toward those parts of the world, thereby creating demand. This can in turn come full circle: van Meegeren's post-trial fame made his paintings rise high enough in value that his own son wound up forging more of them.

Nobody knows for sure how many fakes are on display in museums, galleries, and private collections. Some estimates run very high, due to the way today's plutocrats treat the acquisition of art as an investment strategy and display of status, while others say that improved methods of detection and the emphasis on authenticating an object before somebody forks over millions for it have greatly reduced the incidence. We'll never really know for sure, because of the loss of face inherent in admitting you paid too much for a forgery -- including the cratering in value for other works that might become suspect by association. But if you want to tell a story of trickery and sordid doings, the art world is rife with possibility!



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/aYnVC2)