My favorite forger is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Keating. He would forge paintings, making sure that they were provably fake (impossible materials, FAKE written in lead paint under the painting, that sort of thing), give them away for a song, and let people fool themselves into believing that they had the real thing.
The greatest irony of his story is that some of his fakes are now worth more than the original artists he faked!
> If someone tries to sell you the Mona Lisa, there’s a pretty easy way to check if it’s real: Just go to the Louvre to see if the original’s still there.
Around 1911, this approach was supposedly reversed -
the work was stolen, and forged copies were sold -
or so the story goes - search for "Valfierno" in:
It's interesting to me how the art world seems to stand alone on their opinion about copies. Literature, music, software... in every other area we believe that if a copy can't be told from its master they must both have equal value. I can't imagine someone saying that they'd rather buy the hard drive someone saved their work on instead of a copy transmitted over the network.
Maybe art collectors are wrong about forgeries - if forgeries don't provide the same mental dividend that real paintings do, wouldn't you be able to tell the difference without an X-ray machine?
A lot of the prices of pieces of fine art aren't just tied to the aesthetics, but have to do with artifacts that are scarce and desirable. An Apple I isn't really desirable as a computer, but because it's an Apple I, made by Woz at that time and hard to get. A Nintendo World Championship cartridge might sell for $100,000, but it's due to the same factors, not that people really want to play a game they could still play on an emulator. First editions of novels and other rare books and rare vinyl albums are the same way. It's not just the content of the thing, it's the scarce desirable artifact that holds that content.
Agreed. To add to the historical artifact point; with artworks a part of the value in the artifact is what the rest of the art world was doing at the time. What we take for granted today hasn't always been so and often notable pieces of art are recognizable for their place in the evolution of an art, be it fine art or technology.
The difference is whether you are just a collector or are an aficionado.
This is because many of the ultra-rich use art as a store of wealth. They don't care about the aesthetics; they're interested in a fungible, untraceable money store.
This is similar to the vintage guitar market. Can you tell that the guitar is "original"? The probability that a guitar is 100% original is vanishingly small after about 20 years. All guitars need to be refretted if they are played any appreciable amount. Electric components degrade with time (especially the one used before about 1980). Continuous application of tension means that a neck will have to be reset every couple of decades.
Do you care? If you play the guitar, no. You want a guitar that sounds good, and many fakes actually sound better than the originals (Les Paul clones tend to stay in tune better than the original, ironically, for example).
However, if you're a rich collector, you bought the guitar to brag or to store value, and you do care.
Any good whose exchange is primarily dominated by collectors has the same issues.
Have a read of John Berger's "Ways of seeing". He believes the rich are trying to exclude the poor from art by insisting that the original has some indefinable quality to it that is inherently better in order to retain a higher ground by owning originals in a world where perfect copies can be made.
I'm pretty sure that people would pay much more for an original Harry Potter manuscript than a copy. Ditto for the original tapes artists used (or seeing a live performance).
In both cases, the normal usage is from reproduction - you never buy original books or audio. And in the case of audio, all usage is through reproduction (as it is with eBooks, too).
For paintings, viewing an original is much more common, right?
The greatest irony of his story is that some of his fakes are now worth more than the original artists he faked!